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Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
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. The conventional wisdom shared by many of today’s software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by penny-wise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can’t debug or maintain their “optimized” programs. 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.
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