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I really dislike (hate, actually) the premature optimization quote, as it gets misunderstood all the time. Many less experienced developers use it as an excuse

I really dislike (hate, actually) the premature optimization quote, as it gets misunderstood all the time. Many less experienced developers use it as an excuse of not taking performance considerations into account in design/architecture of a solution. By doing this, they'll notice retrofitting performance to such a design isn't actually trivial.

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Exactly, today it seems like an excuse to not think at all, and even if you call out something what will definitely not scale (e.g. your stupid O(n^3) approach will blow up even already going to 100 items, and you know your max will be more around 1000, just as an abstract example)... and those guys laughing at you with premature optimization blah at the same time well knowing and muttering "the prototype becomes the product" and you know where you will end with this planned tech debt having consequences on the whole architecture.. all could have been avoided with just a little more being less lazy and telling bs about premature optimization.
- wredue 3y ago
  You’re calling this “just an abstract example”, but it’s actually pretty easy to be incredibly slow if you get your ideals from medium articles. The ESB team I have to work with, for example, has a hard cap of 8,000 lines (of XML) in a single file due to their shit performance. Why? “Because recursive, immutable code is ‘easier to reason about’” For starters, I don’t even buy that recursive and immutable cause ease to reasoning, but forgetting that, if it’s causing computers that should be capable of processing files that are millions of lines long to suddenly come to a crawl after just 8,000, we maybe should reconsider this approach.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    "The ESB team I have to work with, for example, has a hard cap of 8,000 lines (of XML) in a single file due to their shit performance. Why? “Because recursive, immutable code is ‘easier to reason about’”" Bullshit like this really makes me want to leave the industry. The more "professional" and "business" programming gets, the more bullshit happens.

throwbadubadu 3y ago

Exactly, today it seems like an excuse to not think at all, and even if you call out something what will definitely not scale (e.g. your stupid O(n^3) approach will blow up even already going to 100 items, and you know your max will be more around 1000, just as an abstract example)... and those guys laughing at you with premature optimization blah at the same time well knowing and muttering "the prototype becomes the product" and you know where you will end with this planned tech debt having consequences on the whole architecture.. all could have been avoided with just a little more being less lazy and telling bs about premature optimization.

wredue 3y ago
You’re calling this “just an abstract example”, but it’s actually pretty easy to be incredibly slow if you get your ideals from medium articles. The ESB team I have to work with, for example, has a hard cap of 8,000 lines (of XML) in a single file due to their shit performance. Why? “Because recursive, immutable code is ‘easier to reason about’” For starters, I don’t even buy that recursive and immutable cause ease to reasoning, but forgetting that, if it’s causing computers that should be capable of processing files that are millions of lines long to suddenly come to a crawl after just 8,000, we maybe should reconsider this approach.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  "The ESB team I have to work with, for example, has a hard cap of 8,000 lines (of XML) in a single file due to their shit performance. Why? “Because recursive, immutable code is ‘easier to reason about’”" Bullshit like this really makes me want to leave the industry. The more "professional" and "business" programming gets, the more bullshit happens.