I said “regularly or intentionally”, because I wanted to differentiate that that is what I have a particular problem with.
And yes, a really one-off business report is fine. As long as it runs and produces an anccurate answer, that is fine. Which is why I distinguished that if you find yourself regularly writing these kinds of algorithms and not having alarm bells going off in your head, that is almost certainly a problem.
I have never in 25 years encountered someone who spent noticeably too long optimizing running time for software that wasn’t performance critical. I have had to respond to at least two to four cases per year where somebody assumed a small case would remain small forever (or just didn’t think about it at all) and caused an outage, a severely bloated AWS bill (unbounded autoscaling + quadratic), or some other completely avoidable hell.
And yes, a really one-off business report is fine. As long as it runs and produces an anccurate answer, that is fine. Which is why I distinguished that if you find yourself regularly writing these kinds of algorithms and not having alarm bells going off in your head, that is almost certainly a problem.
I have never in 25 years encountered someone who spent noticeably too long optimizing running time for software that wasn’t performance critical. I have had to respond to at least two to four cases per year where somebody assumed a small case would remain small forever (or just didn’t think about it at all) and caused an outage, a severely bloated AWS bill (unbounded autoscaling + quadratic), or some other completely avoidable hell.