What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Or that George Santayana quote.
Which one?
I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:
[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ] .
IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:
"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"
They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.