Or 3) You are an excellent developer who understands the cost as well as the benefit behind optimising for performance and memory. Is the time spent optimising

Or 3) You are an excellent developer who understands the cost as well as the benefit behind optimising for performance and memory. Is the time spent optimising better spent building a new feature (i.e. the money saved through efficiency will be less than the value gained by doing something else)? Is the optimised code going to be less flexible in the face of change? Is the optimised code going to be less comprehensible for future maintenance? And so on... Folk who spend their time making sure that everything has as small of a footprint as possible are a royal pain in the many situations where "small footprint" is not the biggest cost of the system :-)