All code is an exercise in living with imperfection. The trick is finding the sweet spots in the scale of imperfection vs. time, which aren't linearly correlate

All code is an exercise in living with imperfection. The trick is finding the sweet spots in the scale of imperfection vs. time, which aren't linearly correlated (eg. you can spend a lot of time gold-plating something and make only small gains in reducing imperfection, while on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes investing a little bit of extra time can yield large gains in reducing imperfection). I'm sure some programming book somewhere has said that in a much more elegant fashion.