A nice little article on the fallacy of premature optimization

[I’m moving some my more interesting old blogs from web archive to someplace they can actually be found. Keep in mind these were written a lot time ago.]

• 07/26/2006

Randall Hyde writes this very interesting article where he expounds on some notions I’ve often discussed in my talks. I’d definitely say that our thoughts are one on the subject.

My favorite bit is this little line portion:

‘Note, however, that [Sir Tony] Hoare did not say, “Forget about small efficiencies all of the time.” Instead, he said “about 97% of the time.” This means that about 3% of the time we really should worry about small efficiencies. That may not sound like much, but consider that this is 1 line of source code out of every 33. How many programmers worry about the small efficiencies even this often?’

Do you think about small efficiencies about one line out of every 33?

The full version of Sir Tony Hoare’s quote is:

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Full disclosure: I don’t just like Randall Hyde’s article because he quoted me a few times, but that didn’t hurt. *grin*