[thejaredhooper]

The actual quote is "premature emphasis on efficiency is a big mistake which may well be the source of most programming complexity and grief."

The 'summarized' catch-phrase always bothers me; the choice between optimized code and inefficient code is always clear to me.

[user51442]

The "premature optimization" quote is from Knuth's Turing Award lecture:

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/370000/361612/a1974-knuth.pd...

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."

[user51442]

..as well as "Structured Programming with go to Statements".