The top 9+7 things every programmer or architect should now

I kind of prefer

    foo = bar ? bla : bli;

I'll see your out-of-context quote and raise you the more subtle, sensible, and actually correct quote from Donald Knuth.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/39/whats-your...

        There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. 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%. A good
    programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be
    wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been
    identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts
    of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of
    programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their
    intuitive guesses fail. (…)