Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.
Quotations about:
coding
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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
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