I loved this sentence from Olin Shivers’ description of some Scheme history:
I fashionably decried premature optimisation in college without really understanding it until I once committed an act of premature opt so horrific that I can now tell when it is going to rain by the twinges I get in the residual scar tissue. Now I understand premature optimisation.
I’d love to know exactly what the premature optimisation was.
I also read Olin’s Dissertation Advice about fifty times in 2004. Great stuff.