On Aug 1, 2006, at 9:45 AM, Joseph wrote:
This was just too good not to share. (Slightly Off Topic)
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html
While this article is not without some worth, I wouldn't trust it too
far. Hyde appears to be yet another of those who quotes sources he
has not read. The quotes about premature optimization he attributes
to Hoare are actually those of Knuth, from his paper "Structured
Programming with go to Statements".
I was also struck by his
Observation #5: Software engineers have been led to believe that they
are incapable of predicting where their applications spend most of
their execution time.
Perhaps they have been led to believe this by Knuth, who writes
"It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of
a program are really critical, since the universal experience of
programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their
guesses fail."
Knuth's article can be found on the web, and I suggest that anyone
wanting to learn about optimization and program design read it.
Charles Yeomans
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