I Have A Hunch That

The Hardest Thing Is To Go To Sleep At Night, When There Are So Many Urgent Things Needing To Be Done. A Huge Gap Exists Between What We Know Is Possible With Today's Machines And What We Have So Far Been Able To Finish.

These Machines Have No Common Sense; They Have Not Yet Learned To "think," And They Do Exactly As They Are Told, No More And No Less. This Fact Is The Hardest Concept To Grasp When One First Tries To Use A Computer.

We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil.

The Designer Of A New Kind Of System Must Participate Fully In The Implementation.

...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.