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People forget the key word ”premature” in the infamous Donald Knuth quote, and think all optimization is evil
by nikanj 4y ago
People forget the key word ”premature” in the infamous Donald Knuth quote, and think all optimization is evil
- pessimizer 4y agoIt's always premature to optimize until your company is failing, because if you aren't failing yet it means it's worked so far. You should always wait until your company is falling apart to do a full rewrite of your core product.
- rmbyrro 4y agoExactly. When the business is failing is when there's lots of time and resources available to make your core product more efficient.
- StillBored 4y agoIs not doing stupid s%$t an optimization? (lol) I'm reminded of the reddit articles a few years back when they were talking about moving to AWS and having to batch database requests to maintain their database perf. Apparently, at the time they were literally sending tens/hundreds of thousands of database queries for each page load request for a logged in user because each comment was collecting all its up/down votes and adding them up rather than just having a per comment karma attached to the comment. This is what happens when you hire a whole bunch of recent grads that frankly have no idea how to write code, and think they are the smartest people on the planet when it comes to distributed systems.