User:RDBrown/Test





|Computer Programming as an Art (1974)
1974 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 17 (12), (December 1974), pp. 667–673


 * Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
 * p. 668


 * In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
 * p. 669 [italics in source]


 * 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.
 * p. 671
 * 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%.
 * Variant in Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1.