The "premature optimization" quote is from Knuth's Turing Award lecture: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/370000/361612/a1974-knuth.pdf http://delivery.acm.org/

The "premature optimization" quote is from Knuth's Turing Award lecture: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/370000/361612/a1974-knuth.pdf http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/370000/361612/a1974-knuth.pd... "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."