Casey Muratori Traces Premature Optimization to Its Roots at BSC 2026
Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
In this talk from the Better Software Conference 2026, Casey Muratori digs into the history behind the famous quote about premature optimization, tracing it back to its origins and exploring why it's often misunderstood. He examines the context of Dijkstra's and Knuth's work, and argues that the real root of the problem is not optimization itself but a deeper issue in how we approach software design.
The idea of Dijkstra being driven into a depression by an IBM ad with a Go Go Girl programmer in it is so funny to me.
- Almondsetat
I think Casey is currently the most informed person to make a series of books or articles summarizing the history of SW Engineering, all the lessons learned and forgotten, and all the good stuff that was published and still hasn't gained traction in the practice
- FacelessJim
Terrific presentation. But I have a comment:
His dismissal of the argument Knuth makes regarding the hot loops could have been explored a bit better. I found it weird he didn’t mention the difference of types of programs of then vs now. Even today, in scientific code it is still absolutely the case a lot of the time that a huge chunk of the runtime comes from a single very very hot loop. It might be hidden in a library, but it’s there.
Instead he focuses only on “program size”.
Knuth samples where very small FORTRAN programs (compared to today’s standards). Today’s program are bigger but the fundamental number crunching primitive of “let’s compute stuff in a loop” remains. It’s just buried under a pile of extra cruft (data loading, parallelism, dispatching etc).
Now we just deal with a lot more programs that are of a whole different class compared to what they where doing with computers in the 70s. We have much more I/O involved. And hot loops don’t like being I/O bound.
- torginus
Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much.
I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.
- fantasizr
I took notice when he breaks down the ethics of gen ai as it pertains to online theft, that AI broke the natural order of putting content online where you'd trade exposure for use https://youtu.be/bjO-s4rNPlY?si=uAtBTb6V_Sw1puBU&t=2244
- kshallvari
THE LEGENDARY GAME PROGRAMMER
- cuechan
He is just legendary when it comes to game programming
- Panzerschrek
It's a common situation for many quotes of such kind. Taken out of context they loose or completely change their initial meaning.
- mberning
Will have to give this a watch after the kids go to bed. I like a lot of Casey’s views even if I don’t agree with them.