Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. -- Donald Knuth

La connaissance d'un défaut ne l'enlève pas, elle nous torture jusqu'à sa correction. -- Daniel Lovewin (Guillaume Kpotufe)

Just like carpentry, measure twice cut once. -- Super-sizing YouTube with Python (Mike Solomon, [email protected])

Its a shame that the students of our generation grew up with windows and mice because that tainted our mindset not to think in terms of powerful tools. Some of us are just so tainted that we will never recover. -- Jeffrey Mark Siskind in comp.lang.lisp

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing it? The same thing happens with software. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. -- Paul Graham, The other road ahead.

Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. ~Theodore N. Vail

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. ~Thomas J. Watson

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama

If you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough. –Oprah Winfrey