“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” is the root of evil by Oleksandr Kaleniuk. I wouldn't necessarily consider this premature. However Knuth himself attributes the “evil quote” to Hoare and Hoare attributes it back to the Knuth, so it’s more of a nobody’s child. Reminds me that good design and efficiency in design, is never premature. Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Just be careful not to micharacterise the more subtle argument that many people would make against premature optimisation: Making good architecture and clean, de-coupled code a first priority can lead to more performance gains in the long term for multiple reasons, without necessarily sacrificing maintainability or correctness, which is *usually* the primary concern above all others. "Premature optimization" is a phrase used to describe a situation where a programmer lets performance considerations affect the design of a piece of code. Variant in Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". As you can probably tell, this article is not "yet another article warning beginning programmers to avoid premature optimization." And look a model like that of React.js, which adds a layer of abstraction, the virtual DOM, which ends up paying massive dividends in performance (especially when combined with immutable data structures). People have misused his quote all over the place, often suggesting that micro-optimizations are premature when his entire paper was advocating micro-optimizations! That’s rare, but compilers still fail to optimize things every now and then, that’s why it is a good idea to check their output with disassembly tool at least for the very intense parts of the system. Frank Dobson. And if you read TAOCP, you know that Donald Knuth himself puts algorithms and the machine far before paradigm is it structural, or functional, or any other type of programming. It is the fear of evil that took us to the point the very basic desktop software is sluggish as hell. ��� David Kra, Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:05:45 UTC. The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. View the list Smoking is the now the principal avoidable cause of premature death in Britain. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" has long been the rallying cry by software engineers to avoid any thought of application performance until the very end of the software development cycle (at which point the optimization phase is typically ignored for economic/time-to-market reasons). http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000084.html), part of which I've reproduced below, describes the problem with reading too much into Hoare's statement: Coarse grained optimization - Allow for caching of all kinds, including connection pooling, memoization and even response caching to avoid unnecessary runtime rework. We are here to anticipate and prevent the problems, and not to spawn them ignorantly because of 45 years of self-deception. Randall Hyde argues that optimization is important even when memory and processor double regularly. Enjoy the best Donald Knuth Quotes at BrainyQuote. Knuth. I believe the Donald Knuth quote "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" engenders a poor view of how to best program. Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. He publishes code examples in MMIX (formerly MIX) machine code instead of high-level languages because this is what really matters. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.--Donald Knuth Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.--Donald Knuth Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. I believe more children's lives can be saved if we work towards it. It’s all bad. One reason is that it's easier to optimise that 3% of code that is proven to be a performance bottleneck without breaking it. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. We thought the way to statically create all the possible combinations and then dispatch it once per image hence enabling cheap per-value processing without any intermediate structures. While premature optimization is bad, disregarding performance altogether is a folly. That's why Donald Knuth chose to highlight it. It happened to be the inner cycle of matrix transformation and apparently, the compiler we used at the time didn’t unroll it solely because of the counter type. Home; Blog; Downloads And Data; Services . - quote by Donald Knuth on YourDictionary. Premature optimization is the root of all evil or at least most of it in programming. Perhaps it was true some 10 or 20 years ago, but nowadays the difference in cache and RAM reading latency is too drastic to ignore. Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. Sometimes it quoted in a longer form: “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”. Knuth refers to it as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of TeX", Software—Practice & Experience 19 :7 (July 1989), pp. Premature optimization is spending too much time optimizing features and specifications that might add minimal value to the product or service. This sentence comes from a famous quote from Donald Knuth: “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. I think the nano-optimization and micro-optimization is perhaps a worse problem for many Perl programmers. We also got 100% of speedup by eliminating an extra call of a rather heavy procedure. 607–685. Donald Ervin Knuth > Quotes > Quotable Quote “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” ― Donald Ervin Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms Knuth’s famous quote about premature optimization was never meant to be a stick to beat people over the head with. More Optimization Quotes Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The thing is, it was first printed 45 years ago in 1974 in an article devoted to justifying the use of “goto” statement in structured programming. Share with your friends. #Numbers #World “People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at … I'd like to see some rules of thumb or red flags which signal that an optimization is premature. Oleksandr Kaleniuk, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” is the root of evil, September 2016 Knuth. Since it would be handy to keep that branch in mind, its removal is clearly premature. 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. Clutters the code. "Premature optimization" is a phrase used to describe a situation where a programmer lets performance considerations affect the design of a piece of code. Cove Mountain Software. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Great Article! Just do what you need at a time ... Everything else is just bullshit. I agree that the low level optimizations we often get questions about in this forum are premature. Donald Knuth made the following two statements on optimization: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Well, sometimes it pays to know your way around meta-programming. After all, it’s just a vector-matrix multiplication, a simple operation. Close. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. firmware for a high volume network switch), and domains where it really is not necessary for the programmer to ever think about performance (e.g. Quote 1: Premature optimization. Images were stored on disk in one of the several integer formats, and when they were loaded, they were being converted to double precision floating points and then back to the integers, only to do some minor transformations on them. Category: Quote. 667–673 Premature optimization is the root of all evil. For example, that means not using spin-loops polling for data to change. I don't think I'm wrong in saying there is a distinction in selecting the right tool for the job versus premature optimization. Are some anecdotes from my practice for evidence of this quote time: premature is. Through the darkest valley, and Outlook, and it pays well in the end ��� Julien,,. 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