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
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll.
I invented nothing new. I simply combined the inventions of others into a car. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed.
I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
There were a lot of naysayers over the years. People would say, 'Why are we spending all of this money? Are you sure this cellular thing will turn out to be something?'
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