3 ms·

Alone the title reminds me of this: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." Source: Computer Programming as a

• titpetric 13y ago
  Pretty sure you are correct. The "quote" was paraphrased from my poor memory. Also from what I read, the book series is, even today, very informative and relevant. I am however disappointed how much damage this quote is doing outside of a proper context. "In practice, it is often necessary to keep performance goals in mind when first designing software, but the programmer balances the goals of design and optimization." ^^ This. I am ashamed when the original quote is being used to basically advocate "write un-optimized code and we'll buy hardware, which is cheaper than development time". I do realize that wasn't the case back when the books were written (hardware was hella expensive), but today this is just encouraging bad form in developers, many times their go-to reaction is "let's add more ram".
  • serge2k 13y ago
    Yup. Instead of discouraging the idea of writing unmaintainable code that is faster in an area that may not even be a bottleneck we get people who use that quote to excuse writing terrible code. Good design is not premature optimization.
• mantrax4 13y ago
  The quote actually goes back much earlier, to the days where writing a program meant writing machine code routines. And it's also highly misunderstood, because it's used as a mantra, out of context. Good development is not mantra-driven.