Rob Pike Quotes

Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other.

Procedure names should reflect what they do; function names should reflect what they return

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection.

There's no such thing as a simple cache bug.

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

If POSIX threads are a good thing, perhaps I don't want to know what they're better than.

A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate.

Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization.

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.

Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces.

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful.

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is

Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building.

Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination