On May 29, 2013, at 6:30 PM, Ian Joyner <ianjoy...@me.com> wrote: > That seems to come out of a belief that well-structured code is code that > runs poorly
No, it’s a paraphrase of a famous quote by Don Knuth ("We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”[1]) He later attributed this to C.A.R. Hoare. The main points behind this are, in my opinion, that: (a) you don’t ever have time to optimize the entire program, and (b) it’s often very unintuitive which parts of the code are bottlenecks. Additionally I find that (c) lots of the code I write ends up being scaffolding that’s going to get replaced anyway later on during development; and (d) heavily optimized code is often harder to maintain. A more extreme version of this statement is the Ward Cunningham's mantra “Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”[2]. I think these are two of the best lessons I’ve learned as I progressed in my craft. They've made me a lot more productive. There’s no point in optimizing something that never gets finished; and getting rat-holed into tweaking tiny details was really preventing me from getting things to the point where they were useable at all. —Jens [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#When_to_optimize [2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#The_Simplest_Thing_that_Could_Possibly_Work _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com