[IgorPartola]

As the foremost domain expert on the subject (the subject being what I meant by my own comment), I can say with 100% certainty that it was in fact a joke, or rather a poor attempt to paraphrase Mark Twain's: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Of course you are right, optimization does take time, whether you are optimizing a computer program or a letter.

[dang]

Not Twain, Pascal: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/.

But yes—just as applicable to computer programming as letter writing.