The Two Rules of Program Optimization

Wow, where does the day go? I spent all my non-meeting time debugging something. At least I fixed it before 5 PM.

The details of the problem are boring, but the whole ordeal could have been avoided if I had just followed the two rules of optimizing software in my Generic Disease Modeling System. What are they?

First Rule of Program Optimization: Don’t do it
Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don’t do it yet

Maybe next week I’ll get a second to write about the good kind of optimization; my statistical physics friends have posted an article on the arxiv which I am a co-author on, about an application of bounded-depth minimum spanning trees, Clustering with Shallow Trees.