> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficien

> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. - Donald Knuth This small inefficiency is not something worth creating complications over. The thing about baby steps is that when you use that sort of language you're already making things sound easier than they are. The first baby step is the hardest step to take. It takes months of work and many falls. My hope is that they manage to write (+ 2 2) or something similar; I'm not trying to make learning the language hard.