Like everything else in the software industry the context does matter: at larger scales small gains in performance translate to large savings in costs (infrastr

Like everything else in the software industry the context does matter: at larger scales small gains in performance translate to large savings in costs (infrastructure, maintenance, etc.). Also, "clean code" (as in from the "Clean Code" book) is generally not good advice for most programs anyway. Not only does it eat performance, it's not all that great for building maintainable, extensible systems.