> Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it A "justification" implies that there is a compromise being made in the name of p

> Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it A "justification" implies that there is a compromise being made in the name of performance. It's very reasonable to choose, in the first iteration of a program, to choose to disregard performance concerns in favor of readability, which is exactly the context of how they framed it. When you make the big initial decisions based on readability, that informs all the rest of your choices in working on that piece of code. If you skip a few steps ahead because e.g. "we're making some extra database calls here, so we should grab all the data we need the first time instead", you'll find it much more difficult to optimize your way back to the most readable code possible. Is it the only way to write software? Of course not. And it may make more sense for the systems and frameworks they use than for yours. But I for one admire their willingness to have a point of view and a principle when it comes to writing code. I don't think it's madness. And I don't think you're wrong either. I just don't think you would have been a good fit for their team. By putting their philosophy out there, they help make that clear. And likewise! I don't begrudge your philosophy, and I think it's often correct. But please don't accuse others of drama and clickbait for describing strong opinions.