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

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.

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

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

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

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