The full quote is: > Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these

The full quote is: > 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%. Sometimes the best way to tackle that 3% is upfront when you're deciding on your system architecture.