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premature optimization

noun

Etymology

It was first coined by Donald Knuth in his 1974 monograph The Art of Computer Programming which won a Turing Award.

Definitions

  1. The act of wasting resources on optimising source code that does not represent a…

    The act of wasting resources on optimising source code that does not represent a significant bottleneck.

    • The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for premature optimization. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA