I've never heard anyone actually say that optimization is evil... probably, because people seem to actually enjoy optimizing code. What's "evil" is optimizing

I've never heard anyone actually say that optimization is evil... probably, because people seem to actually enjoy optimizing code. What's "evil" is optimizing without benchmarks/profiles/etc. Naive implementations are usually easier to write, and can give you a baseline for how much there is to gain (as well as providing "correct examples" for more complicated algorithms).