Make it work, then make it fast. I hear a lot of people complain about higher levels of abstraction in languages like C and C++, because they take away control

Make it work, then make it fast. I hear a lot of people complain about higher levels of abstraction in languages like C and C++, because they take away control or don't allow them to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their programs. I also see a lot of software in the wild that was programmed in C and C++ and runs very fast... but is buggy as hell or has pretty nasty security bugs. The fact is that, regardless how good you think you are, most likely you're not one of the few people who can write fast, bug-free[0] software in C and C++. I certainly am not despite having written quite a bit of C and C++ in the over the years. The amount of high-impact bugs (especially security bugs, eg Heartbleed) [0] Where I really mean: no severe bugs (data corruption, data loss, security flaws)