Code Optimization Quotes

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

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

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.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

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

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

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%.

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

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

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%

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

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

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

Compilers resemble gluttonous eaters who devour excessive quantities of healthy food just to excrete them as refuse.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.