Unless we are talking about speed I think that "premature optimization" refers to readability issues with code. I work in web development and we never had to r

Unless we are talking about speed I think that "premature optimization" refers to readability issues with code. I work in web development and we never had to run a profiler even once to find performance issues. "Premature optimization" was in my experience always the discussion about readability. In the JavaScript world there is always this one guy who can do things in 3 lines of code instead of using 5 methods to understand the code in 5 month again. We called it "Perl coding" vs "standard code".