[tengbretson]

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

-- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

I think a lot about this whenever I hear blanket statements about software performance. A program should be optimized for its performance on whichever piece of hardware it executes on with the highest cost / hour. 95+% of the time that piece of hardware is yours or your coworker's brain.

[74847575639]

Sounds like you're just trying to justify poor software development practices. You can have code that is both performant and readable. Programmers once had to write software for machines 100 times weaker than current machines, yet they had no issue creating software more complex than anything we'll ever build.