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The square roots of all evil

Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, from his 1974 Turing Award lecture (pdf). A fuller quotation of the surrounding context giv…

Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “ premature optimization is the root of all evil ”, from his 1974 Turing Award lecture (pdf). And I’m sure many of us have seen codebases affected by such monstrosities, where an “enterprise architect” applied a Pokémon “gotta catch ‘em all” approach to Martin Fowler’s blog. If you are designing a programming language or database, it is not premature to make it very general (and please do take a look at category theory and other unifying frameworks).

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