I Have A Hunch That The Unknown

...one Of The Most Important Lessons, Perhaps, Is The Fact That Software Is Hard. From Now On I Shall Have Significantly Greater Respect For Every Successful Software Tool That I Encounter. During The Past Decade I Was Surprised To Learn That The Writing Of Programs For Tex And Metafont Proved To Be Much More Difficult Than All The Other Things I Had Done (like Proving Theorems Or Writing Books). The Creation Of Good Software Demand A Significiantly Higher Standard Of Accuracy Than Those Other Things Do, And It Requires A Longer Attention Span Than Other Intellectual Tasks.

Programmers Waste Enormous Amounts Of Time Thinking About, Or Worrying About, The Speed Of Noncritical Parts Of Their Programs, And These Attempts At Efficiency Actually Have A Strong Negative Impact When Debugging And Maintenance Are Considered. We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil. Yet We Should Not Pass Up Our Opportunities In That Critical 3%.

Email Is A Wonderful Thing For People Whose Role In Life Is To Be On Top Of Things. But Not For Me; My Role Is To Be On The Bottom Of Things. What I Do Takes Long Hours Of Studying And Uninterruptible Concentration.

The Sun Comes Up Just About As Often As It Goes Down, In The Long Run, But This Doesn't Make Its Motion Random.

People Who Are More Than Casually Interested In Computers Should Have At Least Some Idea Of What The Underlying Hardware Is Like. Otherwise The Programs They Write Will Be Pretty Weird.