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
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.
The best technology is when you are free to do what you want.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts.
You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.
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