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Comment by Stormbringer | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

  There are still reasons to pay attention to efficiency when writing code.

Did you even get to the second sentence of the linked article before launching your ridiculous rant? Obviously not.

To suggest that nobody wants "reasonable" efficiency anymore is absurd. To do so when the article actually argues your point for you is painful.

To suggest that the people who favour readable code are proposing "pathological inefficiency" is insulting.

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> ridiculous

> absurd

> painful

> insulting

I tried to explain my position on the topic in such a way that we could have a conversation about it. Please, argue to the points I tried to make instead of slinging inflammatory remarks.

You're not discussing the topic, you're committing the logical fallacy of suggesting that the only alternative to your position is some absurd extreme. I.e. readable code is pathologically inefficient.

If you want to have a discussion, don't start by putting a ridiculous set of trousers on the straw-man you made.

I don't believe that my argument fell into the "false dichotomy" trap. The point I tried to make was that I don't think that there's ever a good point in the software development process where it makes sense to ignore performance altogether. I think that a holistic approach makes much more sense.

My argument was not a straw man. The original author specifically said that he, during a specific part of his development process, "[...] was not thinking about performance, about the efficiency of what I [he] wrote, at all [...]". I understand that he circled back on the performance issue later, but in my view, it makes more sense to start with an integrated performance/readability approach than to achieve both in multiple passes.

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