Premature optimization is the root of all evil, but can it ever be too late?

Posted by polygenelubricants on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by polygenelubricants
Published on 2010-03-29T12:23:02Z Indexed on 2010/03/29 12:33 UTC
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best-practices

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"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"

So what is that 3% like?

Can the avoidance of premature optimization ever be taken too extreme that it does more harm than good?

Even if it's rare, has there been a case of a real measurable software engineering disaster due to complete negligence to optimize early in the process?

Bonus question: is software engineering pretty much the only field that has such a counter intuitive principle regarding doing something earlier rather than later before things potentially become too big a problem to fix?

Personal question: how do you justify something as premature optimization and not just a case of you being lazy/ignorant/dumb?

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