The problem with the Knuth quote is that apparently people have turned the word "premature" into a synonym for "up-front." No, that's not what it means. Knuth

The problem with the Knuth quote is that apparently people have turned the word "premature" into a synonym for "up-front." No, that's not what it means. Knuth is not saying that you should code (shit-out) the whole system naively and then try to find out where the bottlenecks are, as this dumb post suggests. Anybody that knows about the Knuth programming contest story would know he would be the last to endorse this. Premature literally means spending time on optimizing individual things before their need becomes apparent. It doesn't mean you should delay optimizing a system design from day 1.