W1SEG

Amateur Radio Station

An engineer’s life consists of staring down one technical problem after another, fixing this or modifying that, in an interminable quest to make something work. Sometimes failure necessitates a wholesale redesign of a system. Then the whole process repeats itself: Design. Build. Test. Fix. Retest. Redesign. Retest. And so on. All in the hope that, one day, you will reach a point where everything, finally, more or less works.
—Eric Berger

quote Knuth

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. 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. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

—Donald Knuth

W1SEG Amateur Radio Station

quote Knuth

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. 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. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

—Donald Knuth

An engineer’s life consists of staring down one technical problem after another, fixing this or modifying that, in an interminable quest to make something work. Sometimes failure necessitates a wholesale redesign of a system. Then the whole process repeats itself: Design. Build. Test. Fix. Retest. Redesign. Retest. And so on. All in the hope that, one day, you will reach a point where everything, finally, more or less works.
—Eric Berger