If You Optimize Everything, You Will Always

...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%.

Ai Has By Now Succeeded In Doing Essentially Everything That Requires 'thinking' But Has Failed To Do Most Of What People And Animals Do 'without Thinking'-that, Somehow, Is Much Harder.

Random Numbers Should Not Be Generated With A Method Chosen At Random

My First Program Taught Me A Lot About The Errors That I Was Going To Be Making In The Future, And Also About How To Find Errors. That's Sort Of The Story Of My Life, Making Errors And Trying To Recover From Them. I Try To Get Things Correct. I Probably Obsess About Not Making Too Many Mistakes.