

Don't optimize your software prematurely - titpetric
http://foreach.org/post/82077677794/premature-optimization

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Fa773NM0nK
I like to think that our programming philosophies aren't carved in stone.
(KISS, DRY, YAGNI, etc.)

To quote Captain Barbossa: ... the code is more what you'd call "guidelines"
than actual rules.

Also, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

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titpetric
I like to think so to - guidelines are basically what best practices are. And
behind every best practice there's a programmer who at one point failed and
fixed their mistake. If you buy more ram/cpu/disk, are you allowing them to
fail, or are you just "patching" the problem yourself?

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recentdarkness
Alone the title reminds me of this:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in
programming." Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974) p. 671

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titpetric
Pretty sure you are correct. The "quote" was paraphrased from my poor memory.
Also from what I read, the book series is, even today, very informative and
relevant. I am however disappointed how much damage this quote is doing
outside of a proper context.

"In practice, it is often necessary to keep performance goals in mind when
first designing software, but the programmer balances the goals of design and
optimization."

^^ This. I am ashamed when the original quote is being used to basically
advocate "write un-optimized code and we'll buy hardware, which is cheaper
than development time". I do realize that wasn't the case back when the books
were written (hardware was hella expensive), but today this is just
encouraging bad form in developers, many times their go-to reaction is "let's
add more ram".

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serge2k
Yup.

Instead of discouraging the idea of writing unmaintainable code that is faster
in an area that may not even be a bottleneck we get people who use that quote
to excuse writing terrible code.

Good design is not premature optimization.

