
Premature optimization is the root of all evil - serb348
http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization
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cafard
Didn't Knuth say "much evil"? I don't think I have my copy of the book with
that essay any more, but that's how I remember it.

~~~
grzm
From the article, which quotes Knuth:

 _In Donald Knuth 's paper "Structured Programming With Go To Statements", he
wrote: "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%."_

Here's a link to the source paper, which confirms the quote:

[https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammi...](https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoTo.pdf)

