This quote does a lot damage in modern times because people forget the context it was said. Donal Knuth said this when talking about programmers decades ago tr

This quote does a lot damage in modern times because people forget the context it was said. Donal Knuth said this when talking about programmers decades ago trying to noodle loops and expressions while they were writing them. In the modern era the same optimizations aren't even necessary at all, because the small stuff is done by the compiler. People think it is a good plan to throw caution to the wind and figure out speed later, which just isn't true. You have to architect for throughput, latency and interactivity from the start and language does matter.