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People who quote Knuth as aphorism are rarely as smart as Knuth. The optimization quote is great, but it's usually deployed as an appeal to authority to justify
by jfb 13y ago
People who quote Knuth as aphorism are rarely as smart as Knuth. The optimization quote is great, but it's usually deployed as an appeal to authority to justify a preconceived, ideological decision -- God knows, I've done this.
Building software is hard, and it's not at all surprising (or reprehensible) that people will seek out shortcuts to winnow their decision space.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> The optimization quote is great, but it's usually deployed as an appeal to authority to justify a preconceived, ideological decision -- God knows, I've done this. Most people I've known have used it as shorthand for "decisions based on optimization concerns require some justification that the optimization is important to the specific application and warrants the cost that come with it"; it's not an appeal to authority (indeed, the authority behind it is almost never referenced, just the bare quote), and its usually, IME, a defense against a preconceived, ideological decision (it works poorly to justify a preconceived, ideological decision, because it doesn't have carry much weight if the person proposing the optimization has any basis for making the claim that the proposed optimization isn't premature; as it shouldn't.)
- snowwrestler 13y agoI think the key to that quote is the agile mindset: the thing you think you're building might not be the thing that will actually meet the customer's need. So regular validation of a "good enough" product will be a better use of time than making the first prototype screamingly fast.