I agree .. fast doesn't take account of how verbose or understandable code will be. As an extreme example, people choose not to write low level code for a good

I agree .. fast doesn't take account of how verbose or understandable code will be. As an extreme example, people choose not to write low level code for a good reason, even if it might be fast. High level / interpreted code will be more understandable, but will automatically have an overhead in most cases.