"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Computer scientists from the United KingdomTuring Award laureatesFellows of the Royal SocietyUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumni
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Quote due to Donald Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements", Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1. Knuth refers to it as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of TeX", Software—Practice & Experience 19:7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685. However, the attribution to Hoare is doubtful.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
C. A. R. Hoare
Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, 11 January 1934 – 5 March 2026) was a British computer scientist, and winner of the 1980 Turing Award. He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages, and for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.
17 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by C. A. R. Hoare →
Related Quotes
"[About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was …"
"[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as …"
"[About PL/I] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doome…"
"[About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors…"
"Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritan…"
"The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, c…"
"The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user."
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no def…"
"[About Fortran] On October 11, 1963, my suggestion was to pass on a request of our customers to relax the ALGOL 60 ru…"
"[About Algol 60] Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their l…"