The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
I’ve always taken it to mean: put your effort into making it work first, before worrying about optimization. Once it works, you can decide whether it’s worth putting effort into optimization. But if you do that first, you might optimize for the wrong thing. Or get distracted by optimization so you never get it to work.
I’ve always taken it to mean: put your effort into making it work first, before worrying about optimization. Once it works, you can decide whether it’s worth putting effort into optimization. But if you do that first, you might optimize for the wrong thing. Or get distracted by optimization so you never get it to work.