I like Knuth and think he’s a great writer, but this particular paper [1] is… hard to read. Almost as if it is an unedited stream of consciousness rather than something he intended to be published.

Reading the section you are quoting from (as well as the section of the conclusion dealing with efficiency), I think it should be clear that in the context of this paper, “optimization” means performance enhancements that render the program incomprehensible and unmaintainable. This is so far removed from what anyone in the last 30+ years thinks of when they read the word “optimization” that we are probably better off pretending that this paper was never written. And smacking anyone that quotes it.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640

I actually think it's a lovely paper (and he obviously intended to publish it, and put a lot of effort into compiling and editing it) and illustrates the nature of his writing very well: he's managed to be encyclopedic about all the topics he chose to discuss, while still having it be very personal (the matter at stake is one of programmers' style and preferences after all). This blog post (https://blog.plover.com/prog/Hoare-logic.html) calls it “my single all-time favorite computer science paper” and here's a recent HN thread with at least two others agreeing it's a great paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416265

I've posted a better scan here: https://shreevatsa.net/tmp/2025-06/DEK-P67-Structured.progra...