I think there is a relatively comfortable middle ground. High quality, readable and performant code are not mutually exclusive optimization quantities - though

I think there is a relatively comfortable middle ground. High quality, readable and performant code are not mutually exclusive optimization quantities - though they will start to compete against each other in the extreme. Often, O(WTF) algorithms are complicated, full of useless fluff and hard to understand - occasionally attempting to follow Uncle Bob's unresearched and unexamined ideas.