Premature optimization

is the root of all evil, according to Donald Knuth.

Prof. Knuth wrote in his paper Structured Programming with Go To Statements:

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.

From time to time, I knew I should have first used a naïve algorithm, not beginning optimizing until I was sure they worked, but I have always been violating the rule.

No related posts.

Tags: dev