Comment by Sammi
6 hours ago
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.
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.