Donald Knuth is the root of all evil
Trying to optimize your code before you know which parts of it consume the most time and resources, or worse yet, doing so even before you know whether your code runs slowly at all, is bad. But so is dismissing preperation, precaution and diligence with a pithy one-liner you picked up from a paper you haven’t read, written by an author whose original meaning you don’t seem to have deciphered. I speak, of course, of the notorious: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” - Donald Knuth Or, one of the very few phrases you may not utter in my presence without risking being told to “get out” in a very Jobs-like fashion. I have heard this phrase being used by developers for everything from justifying their sloppy implementation to silencing someone who has pointed out a bottleneck in the code. Every single time a developer (including a younger version of myself) tried to follow this “advice”, it has ended up making my job harder (often much harder ), not easier. Here is ...