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Are you sure he's the source of the quote?

A quick scholar.google.com search found a match in Byte magazine from 1983:

> Furthermore, many C environments contain measurement tools that enable the programmer to identify these critical sections easily. But the strategy is definitely: first make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast.

The Google URL is http://books.google.com/books?ei=dtOXUoCVHoegkAef9YGQBg&id=A... but that's not enough to tell who wrote it. The full text is at http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYTE... . Unfortunately, it's OCR'ed, with advertisements and articles intermixed.

I believe it was written by James Joyce.

In any case, it looks like Beck was a ~22 year old undergraduate at the University of Oregon when that was published.



Looks like I'm wrong about the attribution. It's in the article "The C Language and Models for Systems Programming" by Johnson and Kernighan.




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