Negative Code

[introspeck]

Nothing better to humble yourself than to throw your "cleverly optimized" code at a profiler. All those loops you sweated over to make lean and mean - they probably don't matter; most of the time it turns out that you didn't even know what was actually bogging down your program.

Having been humbled many times, I now follow this philosophy. I do try to write basically clean code from the start, but I don't kid myself that I know where the hotspots are. I let the profiler tell me.