This analogy becomes more and more true as programming's virtues shift more toward communication and away from cleverness. When performance becomes a commodity

This analogy becomes more and more true as programming's virtues shift more toward communication and away from cleverness. When performance becomes a commodity (and it will soon, even for very large systems), the biggest expense isn't getting from point A to point B, it's the accidents that happen along the way. There couldn't be a better analogy demonstrating the need for programmers to write for humans rather than computers.