W1SEG

Amateur Radio Station

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

quote Hartree

It must be emphasized that the machine does not think for itself. It may exercise some degree of judgment and discrimination, but the situations in which these are required, the criteria to be applied, and the actions to be taken according to the criteria, have all to be forseen in the program of operating instructions furnished to the machine. Use of the machine is no substitute for thought on the basic organization of a computation, only for the labour of carrying out the details of the application of that thought.
—Douglas R. Hartree

W1SEG Amateur Radio Station

quote Hartree

It must be emphasized that the machine does not think for itself. It may exercise some degree of judgment and discrimination, but the situations in which these are required, the criteria to be applied, and the actions to be taken according to the criteria, have all to be forseen in the program of operating instructions furnished to the machine. Use of the machine is no substitute for thought on the basic organization of a computation, only for the labour of carrying out the details of the application of that thought.
—Douglas R. Hartree

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