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Scalable Internet Architectures
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Knuth's quote
by
Jeff Hain
Posted
Knuth's quote
by
Jeff Hain
+1 on Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil":
"Everytime an engineer writes crappy code, this comes out of their mouth next. (...) So, next time someone uses the first quote, you can punch him in the face, and give him the rest of it." (30m20)
Adding more about it, from
www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/09/06/ThePre...
"I have heard the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" statement used by programmers of varying experience at every stage of the software lifecycle, to defend all sorts of choices, ranging from poor architectures, to gratuitous memory allocations, to inappropriate choices of data structures and algorithms, to complete disregard for variable latency in latency-sensitive situations, among others.
Mostly this quip is used defend sloppy decision-making, or to justify the indefinite deferral of decision-making. In other words, laziness.
(...)
First and foremost, you really ought to understand what order of magnitude matters for each line of code you write. (...) To be successful at this, you’ll need to know what things cost. If you don’t know what things cost, you’re just flailing in the dark, hoping to get lucky."
"Everytime an engineer writes crappy code, this comes out of their mouth next. (...) So, next time someone uses the first quote, you can punch him in the face, and give him the rest of it." (30m20)
Adding more about it, from
www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/09/06/ThePre...
"I have heard the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" statement used by programmers of varying experience at every stage of the software lifecycle, to defend all sorts of choices, ranging from poor architectures, to gratuitous memory allocations, to inappropriate choices of data structures and algorithms, to complete disregard for variable latency in latency-sensitive situations, among others.
Mostly this quip is used defend sloppy decision-making, or to justify the indefinite deferral of decision-making. In other words, laziness.
(...)
First and foremost, you really ought to understand what order of magnitude matters for each line of code you write. (...) To be successful at this, you’ll need to know what things cost. If you don’t know what things cost, you’re just flailing in the dark, hoping to get lucky."




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