> By definition an optimization being premature means it's not necessary in the present. No, it is premature when it is not necessary for the deployment (at so

> By definition an optimization being premature means it's not necessary in the present. No, it is premature when it is not necessary for the deployment (at some future point in time). When I was developing for mobile phones (long before the iPhone), the decision of what to optimize when required some educated guesses where the phone market would be in 6 months, when the application is market-ready. (And: In the end, we did optimize a lot of code that did need no optimization 6 months later, but those optimizations made development work much, much more bearable.)