I agree that the answer is not exactly "No", but I disagree with most of your points. Building reusable components, coding at a low level and building a flexib

I agree that the answer is not exactly "No", but I disagree with most of your points. Building reusable components, coding at a low level and building a flexible architecture all take considerably more effort than their alternatives, IMHO. That being said, it makes sense to have the big picture in mind for the first time around and to take some small considerations on the way. Avoid doing inherently bad things like schlepping around tons of unneeded data and not doing some simple caching. Like the recent post about embracing technological debt, much of the early work may be discarded before it see the light of day so no point in over investing. Rather that doing lots of things right the first time, I spend more effort not tightly coupling the pieces so that when you have to write something twice (and you will), it's a clean separation. I'd get the processor intensive stuff done with as little effort as possible (and likely barely fast enough), but in a way that I could rip that part out and plug in some native code when the time came.