"Regardless of scenario" limit your options. If you are shipping a binary to your users that will never be able to get updates, your cautiousness would be just

"Regardless of scenario" limit your options. If you are shipping a binary to your users that will never be able to get updates, your cautiousness would be justified. There are other situations where it will needlessly limits options. There are situations where I have knowingly written O(n^2) or worse, and put a # xxx dragons marker by it. Quick to write, leave my options open, keep my momentum on the problem I care about. I will grep for xxx issues at some later time. I may end up throwing out the code before that happens. If I hit big-o issues before then, I can refactor. I once had a system where the important problems turned out to be a series of IO bottle-necks - nothing to do with computation - but that was obscured because good sense had been burnt at the altar of compute efficiency.