Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American statesman, scientist, philosopher, aphorist
Memorandum on Colonial Taxation
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Quotations about:
optimization
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No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. He is bound to do all the good possible. Yet he must consider the question of expediency, in order that he may do all the good possible, for otherwise he will do none.
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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