James Mickens has written one of the funniest things I've read in a while. Here's an excerpt:
I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented
would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed.
Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,”
and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a
simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would
never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would
wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say
OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE.
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan