The quotes from wikiquote: > "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong

The quotes from wikiquote: > "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." and another instance of the same: > "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Computer_Programming_as_an_Art_(1974) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Computer_Programm... I'm not really seeing much of a "misquote" to be honest. I have always understood this quote to mean that spending too much time micro-optimizing things unnecessarily will waste your time and become a burden to you later. Instead, optimizations should only be performed when the need for optimization becomes manifest.