Quoth The Donald... nevermore.

The Quote

In a somewhat famous statement, Donald Knuth (in a quote he later tried to pawn off on Tony Hoare) allegedly said: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil".

In many years of software development, many people have justified their poorly written code with: "premature optimization" is bad and should never be done because Donald Knuth said so. Very often this was a response when their product fell over under a mild load.

As someone who is involved in code optimization (and have been doing it for over a decade), I can tell you what Donald meant was: to not waste time on making well written code optimally fast and concentrate getting it working well and deal with unexpected inefficiencies later. Profiling and tuning well written code is relatively easy, poorly written code presents a time consuming problem as basic need to be fixed first.

He did not mean that you can just write poorly optimized code and try to justify your actions with a misunderstood quote. Maybe Donald realized the can of worms he had created and tried to distance himself from it; we will never know.

How it all begins

No one writes inefficient code willingly or knowingly. I have never met a developer who had bad intentions. What I have met are developers who have convinced themselves that their coding skills are amazing and they write amazing code. That they were a lot better than they really were.

Case 1

I worked with a developer once who told me that he "was something of a big deal around here", this is before his code was unable to scale past 5 concurrent users and eventually required a complete rewrite (but not before his options vested, he made a lot of money and left to start another company; never learning how average of a developer he was). He was not a bad guy, an average developer at best, but he had convinced himself that he was way above average; a legend in his own mind. Everyone praise him (mostly non technical people). Since he was an average developer who thought he was amazing, he hired people for his group that he thought were average (when in fact they were barely able to write code). The codebase reflected it. When I looked through the code, I saw many basic problems (CS101 level issues). Recursion without stopping conditions through all code paths, this caused an occasional race condition on the browser. Many cases of incorrect collections (like lists of name/value pairs doing O(N) lookup when a map/tree with O(N log N) would have been far more efficient). Places where he used loops inside loops which resulted in exponential slowdowns (single loops were needed). When I asked him about his many basic problems? Quoth The Donald... nevermore.

Case 2

Another lead developer I worked with was constantly told, by people who did not know how to write code, of how he was a superior developer and he had the mentality that he could do no wrong. He spent his development time trying out new technologies and then applying them to the current product mostly unsure how it would work but that it was somehow cool. This was a Frankenstein's monster of software. It had 2 pass pre-build (making it insanely difficult to debug), 2 view rendering engines, 3 client presentation layer libraries, 2 database interface libraries neither worked well enough so there was a lot of SQL statements as well, database schema so poorly designed that an average query required 2 inner joins and 2 outer joins (many were so poor that response times for a web page under 1 user load would easily go over 30 seconds); it was a mess. Load tests with more than 5 concurrent users often never completed and scaling was pretty much buying lots of hardware and hoping it was enough. When asked why not stick with one technology for each area, he said that he was looking for the right one but hasn't had time to go back and unify them. He saw no problems with 20-30 second reply times and claimed it just needed some tweaking. And of course he did Quoth The Donald... nevermore.

What The World Needs Now

There are many more cases but you get the idea. Premature optimization is not writing efficient code up front (that is desirable), it is writing code that is specifically optimized without knowing the big picture. Premature optimization is not an excuse to write poor code or build on a poor design. It means: Don't spend too much time on minor optimizations which yield negligible results.

Efficient well written code at early stages of development can be a difference between a successful project and a long, protracted code cleanup.

Poor Donald... we hardly knew you.