Architecture & practice·Complexity and how it accumulates
you hand-rolled a cache for a function that turned out to run twice a day.
Premature optimisation
Also calledpremature optimization
Making code faster and worse before knowing whether its speed was ever a problem. The full quotation matters and is usually dropped: Knuth's point was about the ninety-seven percent of small efficiencies, not about ignoring performance entirely. Used honestly it is an argument for measuring first; used lazily it becomes a way to dismiss any performance concern, which is why the more useful phrasing in a review is 'what does the profile say'.