alt Hacker NewsThe most misunderstood statement in all of programming by a wide margin.
I really encourage people to read the Donald Knuth essay that features this sentiment. Pro tip: You can skip to the very end of the article to get to this sentiment without losing context.
Here ya go: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640
Basically, don't spend unnecessary effort increasing performance in an unmeasured way before its necessary, except for those 10% of situations where you know in advance that crucial performance is absolutely necessary. That is the sentiment. I have seen people take this to some bizarre alternate insanity of their own creation as a law to never measure anything, typically because the given developer cannot measure things.
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(this is the correct answer, parent needs to understand this better)
> except for those 10% of situations where you know in advance that crucial performance is absolutely necessary
Yeah like, NOT indexing any fields in a database, that'll become a problem very quickly. ;)
Even moreso . I like the Rob Pike restatement of this principle, it really makes it crystal clear:
"You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is."
Moreso, in my personal experience, I've seen a few speed hacks cause incorrect behavior on more than one occasion.
This is crucial detail that almost everyone misses when they are skimming the topic on surface. The implication is that this statement/law is referenced more often to shut down the architecture designs/discussions
In particular I've seen way too many people use this term as an excuse to write obviously poor performing code. That's not what Knuth said. He never said it's ok to write obviously bad code.
I'm still salty about that time a colleague suggested adding a 500 kb general purpose js library to a webapp that was already taking 12 seconds on initial load, in order to fix a tiny corner case, when we could have written our own micro utility in 20 lines. I had to spend so much time advocating to management for my choice to spend time writing that utility myself, because of that kind of garbage opinion that is way too acceptable in our industry today. The insufferable bastard kept saying I had to do measurements in order to make sure I wasn't prematurely optimizing. Guy adding 500 kb of js when you need 1 kb of it is obviously a horrible idea, especially when you're already way over the performance budget. Asshat. I'm still salty he got so much airtime for that shitty opinion of his and that I had to spend so much energy defending myself.
> I have seen people take this to some bizarre alternate insanity of their own creation as a law to never measure anything, typically because the given developer cannot measure things.
Similar to the "code should be self documenting - ergo: We don't write any comments, ever"