Comment by tananaev
8 hours ago
With modern tools it should be pretty easy to build scalable solutions. I take premature optimization as going out of your way to optimize something that's already reasonable. Not that you should write really bad code as a starting point.
The problem is that that this term gets misused to say the opposite of what it was intended for.
It's particularly the kind of people who like to say "hur hur don't prematurely optimize" that don't bother writing decent software to begin with and use the term as an excuse to write poor performing code.
Instead of optimizing their code, these people end up making excuses so they can pessimize it instead.
To me that's the people who write desktop software in Electron. Hate that.
In my career Ive seen about 1000 instances of somebody trying to optimize something prematurely.
Usually those people also have a good old whinge about the premature optimization quote being wrong or misinterpreted and general attitudes to software efficiency.
Not once have I ever seen somebody try to derail a process of "ascertain speed is an issue that should be tackled" -> "profile" -> fix the hot path.
"Not once have I ever seen somebody try to derail a process of "ascertain speed is an issue that should be tackled" -> "profile" -> fix the hot path."
That's because your boss will never in a 1000 years hire the type of dev who can do that. And even if you did, there will be team members who will fight those fixes tooth and nail. And yes, I have a very cynical view of some devs but they earned that through some of the pettiest behavior I have ever seen.
> Not once have I ever seen somebody try to derail a process of "ascertain speed is an issue that should be tackled" -> "profile" -> fix the hot path.
Many things need to be optimized before you can easily profile them, so at this stage its already too late and your software will forever be slow.
Yeah, I interpret "premature optimization" as taking a request that takes 500ms and focusing on saving a couple ms by refactoring logic to avoid a SQL JOIN or something.
Your users are not going to notice. Sure, it's faster but it's not focused on the problem.