Donald Knuth Quotes

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%

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. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Hosting various versions of my countdown program has kept me extremely busy, and I loved every minute of it.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

I'm a great coder. But I am not pushing that so much anymore because there are thousands of great coders.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

I don't like programming. It's tedious.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. Had I not been a therapist, I would have been an efficiency expert.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

Programming is all about numbers.