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“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization
by slowhand09 4y ago
“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
- Donald Knuth "The Art of Computer Programming"
- tijsvd 4y agoFirst, this is about data access and not programming. Second, that quote is from a time when compiler optimizations did not exist, and the programmer was supposed to use all kinds of clever tricks to speed up code (what today you get for free with -O3). That kind of optimization is the context of the quote, and it's hardly ever appropriate to just throw into some discussion about optimization.