In the first paragraph he notes that the quote was popularized by Knuth but cites Hoare as the author.
"Every programmer with a few years' experience or education has heard the phrase 'premature optimization is the root of all evil.' This famous quote by Sir Tony Hoare (popularized by Donald Knuth) has become a best practice among software engineers." As for the apparent contradiction between Hyde and Knuth I think that the complete quote makes it clear that if the code is obviously awful then it is wise to clean it up. That's different from simply making some wild speculative guesses about were a bottleneck would likely occur. Here is the whole paragraph: "Observation #5: Software engineers have been led to believe that they are incapable of predicting where their applications spend most of their execution time. Therefore, they don't bother improving performance of sections of code that are obviously bad because they have no proof that the bad section of code will hurt overall program performance." This idea is further developed in the following paragraph: "One thing nice about optimization is that if you optimize a section of code that doesn't need it, you've not done much damage to the application. Other than possible maintenance issues, all you've really lost is some time optimizing code that doesn't need it. Though it might seem that you've lost some valuable time unnecessarily optimizing code, don't forget that you have gained valuable experience so your are less likely to make that same mistake in a future project." I'm not trying to defend the article just clarifying what I see as the authors main point. That being that we have a lot of clunky applications on the market that seem to be poorly optimized. I'll refrain from naming some of my favorite clunky apps to avoid a tangential thread. ~joe -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Charles Yeomans Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 9:49 AM To: REALbasic NUG Subject: Re: SOT: Premature Optimization 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 _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html> _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
