From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2008-03-30T14:32:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Is ruby is faster than all Object oriented Scripting langs

mutahhir hayat wrote:
> 
> Also, a lot of the books written by a lot of the greats were done at the
> time where the hardware was limited, and the common developer required
> certain ninja skills to do what they wanted. Now, its a little different.
> You just can't expect the philosophy of driving a moped to apply to driving
> a ferrari. I'm not saying that you should just write crappy code as you
> like, but just that you need to write good solid "code" and worry about the
> language when it gives you a problem. As knuth said, "premature optimization
> is the key to all evil (or atleast most of it) in programming".

First of all, I'm not at all sure whether it was Knuth, Dijkstra, Hoare 
or Wirth that first coined this "proverb". It sounds to me more like 
Wirth than the other three. Second, as I've already posted, in no way 
does that proverb, even if you happen to believe in it, justify lack of 
attention to performance at any point in the software development cycle. 
And as a working performance engineer, I think that proverb is simply 
nonsense.