Speed is the unstated requirement

I hate unreadable code. So, whenever I see developers doing things like using StringBuffers instead of plain vanilla strings to make a couple of concatenations and tell me it’s to make the code run faster, I start to get nervous.

And very ugly problems have been caused in the name of speed and scalability. Remember when everyone was high about distributed objects? The fever is back again with xml web services in service oriented architectures. You wouldn’t believe the amount of useless serialization and deserialization I’ve seen in some systems.


But speed is one requirement that users will not state explicitly (like easy of use). If they do, it’s because the problem has already reached scary dimensions. And we need to understand that speed will play a major role in the likeability of our applications.

So optimize often. Optimize well. Be fanatic about speed.