
The Fallacy of Premature Optimization - ingve
http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1513451
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MrTonyD
Maybe it's because I've been working with computers for so many years, but as
I was reading this paper I was thinking of all the exceptions to the points
that it was making.

I've seen too much time spent optimizing a product that was destined to never
find a market, and too little time spent optimizing a product whose poor
performance doomed its market entry. And, having spent literally months
dedicated to optimizing code, I've also seen that some code could have been
easily optimized "up front", while other code would have been impossible to
optimize before it was applied to real-world use cases.

Maybe, for me, the real answer is experience. It takes experience to recognize
that the market you are in, and the particular problem you are solving, and
the approaches you are taking to solve the problem cannot be underestimated -
they must be understood as much as possible because they ultimately determine
the definition of "premature optimization".

