Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
Interpretation
Optimizing without understanding the core issues leads to more problems than it solves, wasting time and resources.
This quote by Eric S. Raymond highlights the common pitfall in design and programming where a rush to optimize performance can overlook the fundamental bottlenecks of a system. The obsession with making things faster or more efficient often results in complicated solutions that introduce new bugs and challenges, consequently wasting more time and resources than would have been expended on simpler, clearer design choices.
In practice
During a software development meeting, this quote can be used to remind the team to prioritize understanding the system before diving into optimizations.
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.
When you post something, when you text something, you lose ownership of it when you hit enter or send. Who you send it to, where you post it, they take ownership of that information whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, you don't lose responsibility for that text or post.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
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