Early speed optimizations aren’t premature
As you code, you might have a coworker, or friend, or a little voice in your head, reminding you of Knuth’s famous saying: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
But what makes an optimization premature, anyway?
The short answer is that this aphorism is a tautology.
“Premature” means “too early,” so we can rephrase the point as “doing things at the wrong time isn’t ideal.”
Can’t argue with that!
The problem with this saying is that many people wrongly interpret it as “early optimization is the root of all evil.”
In fact, writing fast software from the start can be hugely beneficial.
In order to reduce the scope a bit, I’m going to focus on one particular problem domain: data processing pipelines or batch jobs.
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