This is a great point. I put a high value on writing efficient software, but you have to know when to do it! For instance, I wrote a script to download the O'

This is a great point. I put a high value on writing efficient software, but you have to know when to do it! For instance, I wrote a script to download the O'Neill's tune collections in ABC [1] the other day. I wrote it in Perl 6, not exactly known for blazing performance. (It was a three line script, one of which was just a closing bracket. [2]) If I'd carefully written it in C++, it would have taken me at least 20x as long to write, and it would no doubt have been substantially more "efficient". But it would not have been significantly faster in execution, because it was using curl to download the ABC files that was the slow part. [1] For instance, http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/book/oneills/waifs/ http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/book/oneills/waifs/ [2] https://gist.github.com/colomon/ef8e4a8801d01b1d5813 https://gist.github.com/colomon/ef8e4a8801d01b1d5813