re: Premature optimization is the root of all evil, or is it?

Luciano — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:24:56 GMT

Maybe you should read this one:

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html

also ;)

re: Premature optimization is the root of all evil, or is it?

Pascal Craponne — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:42:55 GMT

There are a lot of optimization kinds in an application, and each kind has a favorite place.

- Conception, for example is the good place to start optimizing the processes (yes, that's an optimization, just a "business process optimization").

- In daily development, optimization is oriented towards the developped modules (it's what I would call "local optimizations").

- In integration test phases, optimization will focus on the most time consuming activities.

With today technologies, optimizations most often relate to algorithms, thus they can be integrated painlessly during all development cycle.

And "Continuous optimization" is also closer to agile development (exactly as "release often, release soon", we could say "optimize often, optimize soon").

So yes, 10 years ago, premature optimization was a bad thing (it implied people rewriting code parts in assembly language instead of C), but we must stop listening to dinosaurs :)