Favorite Sayings

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Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to performance. The real challenges are getting programs completed quickly, ensuring their quality, and managing the complexity of large applications. Thus the primary design criterion for software should be simplicity, not speed. Occasionally there will be parts of a program where performance matters, but you probably won't be able to predict where the performance issues will occur. If you try to optimize the performance of an application during the initial construction you will add complexity that will impact the timely delivery and quality of the application and probably won't help performance at all; in fact, it could actually reduce the performance ("faster" algorithms often have

Favorite Sayings John Ousterhout Professor Department of Computer Science Home Projects Publications Homa Wiki Software Design Book FAQ Students Favorite Sayings Directions Odds & Ends My Favorite Sayings The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular atte

Favorite Sayings

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