[rurban]

Exactly. It's the same myth as premature optimization. Those people tend to ignore good data design (shrink the structs, share fields, order your fields, prefetch arrays, avoid ptr chasing, no trees but tries, hashes over trees, ...) and rather think in costs by lines or ops. Which is horribly wrong for the last 15 years.

Given that any simple bit or int arithmetic might be 50x faster than accessing a bloated field in a bloated struct, they'll never be able to write performant software, yet understand why more code and more lines are faster.