"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about,
or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their
programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a
strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are
considered. We should forget about small efficiencies,
say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root
of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that
critical 3%"- Donald Knuth