Post #2716237
2026-04-25 01:16 UTC
@MartyFouts@mastodon.online Well that's a whole other discussion, on which I and many others are perfectly comfortable with Knuth being wrong.
It is the act of thinking one level down, that ensures that people don't end up with a mad panic scramble to optimise inherently slow code at the end of the project.
Replies (1)
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@MartyFouts@mastodon.online 2026-04-25 02:20
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place Knuth wrong about the well documented perils of premature optimization? Un huh. I think, perhaps, from your last sentence you don’t understand the nuances of Knuth’s point, which was mostly an expansion on Tony Hoare, anyway. Knuth never argued to wait until the end to optimize, by the way. And long experience tells me that concentrating one level down rarely works as well as concentrating on good abstraction before writing code.