On May 29, 2013, at 6:30 PM, Ian Joyner <[email protected]> wrote:
> That seems to come out of a belief that well-structured code is code that
> runs poorly
No, it’s a paraphrase of a famous quote by Don Knuth ("We should forget about
small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the
root of all evil.”[1]) He later attributed this to C.A.R. Hoare.
The main points behind this are, in my opinion, that: (a) you don’t ever have
time to optimize the entire program, and (b) it’s often very unintuitive which
parts of the code are bottlenecks. Additionally I find that (c) lots of the
code I write ends up being scaffolding that’s going to get replaced anyway
later on during development; and (d) heavily optimized code is often harder to
maintain.
A more extreme version of this statement is the Ward Cunningham's mantra “Do
The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”[2].
I think these are two of the best lessons I’ve learned as I progressed in my
craft. They've made me a lot more productive. There’s no point in optimizing
something that never gets finished; and getting rat-holed into tweaking tiny
details was really preventing me from getting things to the point where they
were useable at all.
—Jens
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#When_to_optimize
[2]
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#The_Simplest_Thing_that_Could_Possibly_Work
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