Program Efficiency Quotes

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Being a fiscal conservative is not about slashing programs that help the poor, or improve health care, or ensure a social safety net. It's about insisting services are provided efficiently, get to only the people that need them, and achieve the desired results. Fiscal conservatives have hearts too — but we also insist on using our brains, and that means demanding results and holding government accountable for producing them

The Workforce Investment Improvement Act of 2012 would consolidate and eliminate dozens of ineffective or duplicative programs, enhance the role of job creators in workforce development decisions, and improve accountability over the use of taxpayer dollars.

I'm gonna keep Social Security without change, except I'm going to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse; same thing with Medicare.

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

There is a lot of waste in government-run programs generally, and a lot of waste and fraud and misuse of money in Medicare and Medicaid that can be saved.

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

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

Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

The principle that needs to be used to guide the spending is, 'How successful is the program?'

By finding waste and abuse in entitlement programs, and eliminating it, we can ensure that the funds that are put into these programs go to the people that need them the most.

Spending a few hundred million dollars more a year on evaluations could save tens of billions of dollars by teaching us which programs work and generating lessons to improve programs that don’t

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

Far too many government spending programs have gone years, even decades, without being reauthorized, leaving the American people less able to effectively review, rethink, and possibly eliminate government programs.

Unfortunately, Democrats don't want to wage a war on poverty or improve program integrity; they prefer talking points.