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
I think Zelda 64 is utilizing about 90 percent of the N64 potential, ... When we made Mario 64 we were simply utilizing 60 to 70 percent. So we have come a long way I believe.
I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else - there is no other way.
The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we're going to take a step back and think about what's most likely to achieve that goal.
You can't defend. You can't prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
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