That's a great short read on the idiocy of over-optimization. I get a lot of similar questions when people learn that I write common lisp for a living - in most cases they go silent when I provide a sufficiently efficient solution to a problem that was just given to me in the meeting in which we were supposed to agree on a schedule for the implementation.... (which btw also happened a lot when I was mostly hacking in perl 15 years ago - if you haven't read "beating the averages"[1], read it now!).