Hugo Kornelis talks trade-offs:
But I wanted to contribute anyway. So here is a recent example of code that probably would have made me feel a way if I had been the type of person that gets emotional over code. Or put differently, here is the story of how I gained performance by reducing readability and maintainability.
For the record, and to prevent confusion, I am not going to name actual customers, nor name the ERP system used, and the description I give is highly abstracted away from the original problem, and heavily simplified as well. I describe the basis of what the issue was with the code I encountered and how I fixed it, but without revealing any protected information.
My internal motto is:
- Start with simple, readable code
- Move to more complex, faster performance in spots which are necessary
- Document why the code is more complex with illuminating comments, so that way a future developer (including future you) won’t say, “What was this yokel thinking, doing this complicated thing when there’s an easy approach like this?”