I've once read a blog entry from a developer who was hired to speed up some piece of software. He achieved a few hundred fold speed up. Not primarily because he

I've once read a blog entry from a developer who was hired to speed up some piece of software. He achieved a few hundred fold speed up. Not primarily because he is so good (though he is), but because the original developer had a large matrix of numbers stored as a 2d-array of strings and converted them back and forth whenever he had to do an operation on that matrix. You simply can't make up the shit that some people will do.