It seems to me, that this article is based on wrongly understood idea. "Premature optimization" should be rather considered as an idea to consider the whole pi

It seems to me, that this article is based on wrongly understood idea. "Premature optimization" should be rather considered as an idea to consider the whole picture first. It's scary sometimes, but engineers are usually paid because of creating something and that creation is usually more than a set of highly optimized code lines. Consider the fact, that even when analyzing algorithms, you should consider whether your point of focus are allocations or comparisons. You have to remember about cpu time, memory, I/O, cache, data fragmentation and sometimes even power outages. Thus, there is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE TO CODE WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT GIVEN CODE IS SUPPOSED TO DO, but killing yourself over few extra miliseconds of cpu time, or even few extra megabytes of storage usually is SENSLESS. What's more premature optimization can easily lead to mentall exhaustion (because "well, I spent 8 hours writing a function in assembly, so I'm tired") and eventually, decrease of quality of the rest of the code. And even if not, you have good chance of writing code, that is beyond reusability. Summing up, pretty please, everyone, stop confusing 'code desing' and 'optimization'.