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Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
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Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#262[flagged]
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#263There are very few phrases in all of history that have done more damage to the project of software development than: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." First, let's not besmirch the good name of Tony Hoare. The quote is from Donald Knuth, and the missing context is essential. From his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements": "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,…
I too learned this the hard way, via a supposedly concurrent priority queue that did quadratic-time work while holding a lock over the entire thing. I was told that "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Sorry, folks, but that's just an excuse to make dumb choices. Premature _micro_optimization is the root of all evil.
EDIT: It was great training for when I started working on browser performance, though!
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#264There are very few phrases in all of history that have done more damage to the project of software development than: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." First, let's not besmirch the good name of Tony Hoare. The quote is from Donald Knuth, and the missing context is essential. From his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements": "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,…
I too learned this the hard way, via a supposedly concurrent priority queue that did quadratic-time work while holding a lock over the entire thing. I was told that "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Sorry, folks, but that's just an excuse to make dumb choices. Premature _micro_optimization is the root of all evil. EDIT: It was great training for when I started working on browser performance, though!
And if I may add a corollary: Measurement doesn't need to be held off until the end of the project! Start doing it as soon as you can!
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#265There are very few phrases in all of history that have done more damage to the project of software development than: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." First, let's not besmirch the good name of Tony Hoare. The quote is from Donald Knuth, and the missing context is essential. From his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements": "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,…
> Multiple generations of programmers have now been raised to believe that brutally inefficient, bloated, and slow software is just fine. There is no limit to the amount of boilerplate and indirection a computer can be forced to execute. There is no ceiling to the crystalline abstractions emerging from these geniuses. There is no amount of time too long for a JVM to spend starting. I think that's due to people doing…
The boilerplate and indirection isn't done for performance
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#266There are very few phrases in all of history that have done more damage to the project of software development than: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." First, let's not besmirch the good name of Tony Hoare. The quote is from Donald Knuth, and the missing context is essential. From his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements": "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,…
This discussion kind of irks me. I just read these posts as:
"The quote saying A is bad. Actually it said A all along!"
It's just complaining about others making a different value judgement for what is a worthwhile optimization. Hiding behind the 'true meaning of the quote' is pointless.
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#267[flagged]
That's Rule 5 no?
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
>1. Somebody verifies with the users that speed is actually one of the most burning problems. Sometimes this is too late. C++98 introduce `std::set` and `std::map`. The public interface means that they are effectively constrained to being red-black trees, with poor cache locality and suboptimal lookup. It took until C++11 for `std::unordered_map` and `std::unordered_set`, which brought with them the adage that you sh…
You've inadvertently made an argument for deprecation, not ignoring rob's rule. When building interfaces you are bound to make mistakes which end users will end up depending on (not just regarding optimization). The correct lesson to learn from this is not "just dont make mistakes" but to try and minimize migration costs to prevent these mistakes from getting tightly locked in and try to detect these mistakes earlier…
How would you have minimised migration costs for std::map?
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#269"Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis has a lot more, if you like short snippets of wisdom :) https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html > Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. Always preferred Perlis' version, that might be slightly o…
There's also: >I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. -- Linus Torvalds
That is excellent. I'm putting that in my notes.
Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
#270There are very few phrases in all of history that have done more damage to the project of software development than: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." First, let's not besmirch the good name of Tony Hoare. The quote is from Donald Knuth, and the missing context is essential. From his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements": "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,…
As someone currently writing 16-18 tables all with common definition, and crud, Id like some abstraction