Right, and my point is that maintenance is a massive cost which is boring, and often overlooked when talking about the 'cost' of code. Slow code causing excessi

Right, and my point is that maintenance is a massive cost which is boring, and often overlooked when talking about the 'cost' of code. Slow code causing excessive CPU load or requiring multiple application servers is one cost, but maintenance is another, and the skill is to understand when it's appropriate for what. My default would be to generate maintainable code first, and worry about performance when it matters, but a knee-jerk 'linked lists are slow so avoid' approach is almost always the wrong way of approaching it. Choose the correct data structure and algorithm for maintainability, then optimise if it's too slow should be the default in my opinion.