In my experience, most people who say something like this mean "To hell with your longer-term thinking, look at the short-term success my short-term thinking has got me!"
That's a good point. However, Torvalds specifically has got some solid long-term success as well to his credit.
And in programming in particular, I think there's a lot to be said for avoiding elegance creep.
Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.
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* "Do not quote yourself." --Tiiba
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