> I guess that performance is at least as counter intuitive as statistics. I don't think this is really true. After you've optimized enough code over the years

> I guess that performance is at least as counter intuitive as statistics. I don't think this is really true. After you've optimized enough code over the years, you start to get a sense for bottlenecks, and your code is usually "fast enough" even on the first try. When it isn't, finding the problem with a profiler is usually pretty straightforward.