I don't find that at all — I find that keeping it elegant keeps it adaptable, applicable in a broad set of circumstances, and understandable. And that these thi

I don't find that at all — I find that keeping it elegant keeps it adaptable, applicable in a broad set of circumstances, and understandable. And that these things keep a program from getting slower over time (both pre- and post-deployment) as requirements change. I also find that a lot of times when programmers look at something elegant and say "that'll be slow", it's because they're wrongly estimating the relative speeds of things. A common example: they're counting function calls when they should be counting I/O operations that are many, many orders of magnitude slower.