The problem with old, out-of-context quotes is that they are old and out of context. The Knuth quote is from 1974 and is preceded by the not unimportant statem

The problem with old, out-of-context quotes is that they are old and out of context. The Knuth quote is from 1974 and is preceded by the not unimportant statement that "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs." What is considered "noncritial" in a modern CRUD web app might not be the same as an algorithmically dense program written in assembler for a PDP-11. For example, it's going to be very difficult to optimize away the frameworks you depend on to make your app feature complete to begin with.