From a link on Hacker News (the occasionally interesting “Reddit for Erlang, Lisp and Haskell using proto-entrepreneurs”), this 2006 ACM Ubiquity article:

Every programmer with a few years' experience or education has heard the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” [...] Unfortunately, as with many ideas that grow to legendary status, the original meaning of this statement has been all but lost”

I would not agree with all the proposed solutions to the problem, but I do agree with most of the observations.

One of the most frustrating things I found when working on performance ...