Don't optimize your software prematurely

I like to think so to - guidelines are basically what best practices are. And behind every best practice there's a programmer who at one point failed and fixed their mistake. If you buy more ram/cpu/disk, are you allowing them to fail, or are you just "patching" the problem yourself?

Pretty sure you are correct. The "quote" was paraphrased from my poor memory. Also from what I read, the book series is, even today, very informative and relevant. I am however disappointed how much damage this quote is doing outside of a proper context.

"In practice, it is often necessary to keep performance goals in mind when first designing software, but the programmer balances the goals of design and optimization."

^^ This. I am ashamed when the original quote is being used to basically advocate "write un-optimized code and we'll buy hardware, which is cheaper than development time". I do realize that wasn't the case back when the books were written (hardware was hella expensive), but today this is just encouraging bad form in developers, many times their go-to reaction is "let's add more ram".

The quote actually goes back much earlier, to the days where writing a program meant writing machine code routines.

And it's also highly misunderstood, because it's used as a mantra, out of context.

Good development is not mantra-driven.