Re:Generating a Java program with 90% less code
by landryraccoon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @01:07PM
(#21704965)
But it's not really a corner case though. For a lot of professional applications it's perfectly fine to make a tradeoff of complexity or readability in order to get performance. And that tradeoff is done for business reasons - because sometimes the computer is more important than the programmer.
Of course its not a universal rule, its not a law of physics. Doesn't make it less useful as a guiding principle (similarly, design patterns in software architecture).
The core argument is that we're besides the point in conventional (2019) computing where we need to worry too much about optimizing code to run as efficiently as possible. The complexity and bottlenecks to delivering features is now in writing software that is meant to be worked on and maintained by a large number of humans. And for that purpose, it is better to optimize for clarity.