> Making a random function faster and harder to maintain is bad engineering if the speed isn’t useful. 1) It's not some random function, it's part of the stand

> Making a random function faster and harder to maintain is bad engineering if the speed isn’t useful. 1) It's not some random function, it's part of the standard library. 2) Three-way string compares are far from uncommon, and string comparisons are relatively expensive. Therefore, a speedup would be useful. Optimizing this function would not count as "premature".