Insomniac Games Head to Engine Director Mike Acton  @GDC 2010

(Lie #1) Software is a platform

"The reality is software is not a platform. You can't idealize the hardware. And the constants in the "Big-O notation" that are so often ignored, are often the parts that actually matter in reality(...) You can't judge code in a vacuum. Hardware impacts data design."

(Lie #2) Code should be designed around a model of the world
"There is no value in code being some kind of model or map of an imaginary world (...) it is extremely popular. If there's a rocket in the game, rest assured that there is a "Rocket" class (...) which contains data for exactly one rocket and does rockety stuff (...) There are a lot of performance penalties for this kind of design, the most significant one is that it doesn't scale. At all. One hundred rockets costs one hundred times as much as one rocket. And it's extremely likely it costs even more than that !"

(Lie #3) Code is more important than data
"Code is ephimiral and has no real intrinsic value. The algorithms certainly do, sure. But the code itself isn't worth all this time (...). The code, the performance and the features hinge on one thing - the data."

http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2008/03/three-big-lies.html
http://www.insomniacgames.com/assets/filesthreebiglies2010.pdf