Also, I mean, if you've grown up in the era of multicore gigahertz, where "gigabytes" is where our opening bid on RAM starts, you just don't understand what pro

Also, I mean, if you've grown up in the era of multicore gigahertz, where "gigabytes" is where our opening bid on RAM starts, you just don't understand what programming on this era of machine was like. The difference between a single name[0]=='.' and two calls to a string comparison function could very well have resulted in noticeable differences in performance, in real-world cases. I like to keep an eye on the costs of what code I'm writing to make sure I don't get too 21st century and let my codebase bloat until it's slow as molasses, but at the same time I happily harvest the benefits of usually not caring whether this function call is inlined or not, or caring about the exact number of cycles an indirect function call takes, etc. It's a delicate balance but worthwhile to cultivate it.