https://wist.info Wish I'd Said That! Wed, 20 May 2026 16:17:04 +0000 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://wist.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/little-w-little-box-60x60.jpg https://wist.info 32 32 43606282 https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/2318/ https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/2318/#respond Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000 Dave http://wist.info/wp/?p=2318 There is no doubt that the “grail” of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Donald E. Knuth (b. 1938) American computer scientist, mathematician, academic
Essay (1974-12), “Structured Programming with go to Statements,” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6
    (Source) ]]> https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/2318/feed/ 0 2318 https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/81691/ https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/81691/#respond Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:11:22 +0000 Dave https://wist.info/?p=81691 Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

Donald E. Knuth (b. 1938) American computer scientist, mathematician, academic
Essay (1996), “Foreword” to Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger, A = B (1996)
    (Source) ]]> https://wist.info/knuth-donald-e/81691/feed/ 0 81691