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Donald E. Knuth, a famous wizard, is fond of saying:
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Here's some context:
There is no doubt that the "grail" of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and such attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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Copyright © 2003 M. J. Dominus |