(April 25, 2016 at 8:24 am)Mathilda Wrote:(April 25, 2016 at 8:09 am)bennyboy Wrote: For those of you against the project on the grounds that clean, easy-to-understand code is more important than optimization: I disagree.
Doesn't matter how optimised it is if it's giving you the wrong results.
Code changes over its lifetime. Maintenance introduces bugs. Legibility reduces the chance of bugs being introduced.
Writing legible code is a good habit to develop from the very beginning.
Saying that a basketball player should develop a good layup right from the start doesn't mean he shouldn't spend a little time trying to see if he can do a slam dunk. Yeah, a visually-pleasing program is a good professional practice. But trying to see how much use you can squeeze into a single line of code, or counting clock cycles on 3 different variants of a routine, can increase programming IQ-- and that can eventually make seemingly impossible tasks possible.
