Rob Pike Quotes

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

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.

Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

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

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

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

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

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

Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces.