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by jcampbell1 4499 days ago
It is a reference to this well known quote:

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." --Donald Knuth
2 comments
skyebook 4499 days ago
Except using indexes is a major part of developing for a database. In many simple schemas, performance will completely break down without proper indexing. That's a bit different than spending time investigating if for-each is faster than a traditional loop.
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jcampbell1 4499 days ago
> Except

I am not sure what the exception is about. I agree 100% with the rest of your comment.

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skyebook 4499 days ago
My exception was to the idea of this being a premature optimization (sorry, I probably should've replied directly to your comment with the CSS example)
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nousernamesleft 4499 days ago
I am aware of that quote. And that is precisely my point, he is talking about premature optimization, not optimization. What could possibly make you think that the questions in this quiz are examples of premature optimization?
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