“ There is a computer science mantra (one of many) stated by Donald Knuth as; “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve argued for a long time that defining “premature” for a particular situation is what separates a senior and a junior engineer. Many times I hear the argument for inefficiencies as, “we didn’t want to prematurely optimize it and now that we see it, it is the right time to fix it.” That’s generally a bad position to be in. The awful thing now is that I witness optimization delinquency on a regular basis. When pointing out a point for specific optimization and the response is: “buying more servers is cheaper than fixing that problem.” Achieving a two-fold performance boost is increasingly more common due to optimization delinquency.
soxiam
"Boards don't hit back"
May 24, 2007
