Chapter 5. Saving Time and Memory
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
– Bruce Lee
I love this quote from Bruce Lee. He was such a wise man! Especially, the second part,
"hack away at the unessential"
, is to me what makes a computer program elegant. After all, if there is a better way of doing things so that we don't waste time or memory, why not?
Sometimes, there are valid reasons for not pushing our code up to the maximum limit: for example, sometimes to achieve a negligible improvement, we have to sacrifice on readability or maintainability. Does it make any sense to have a web page served in 1 second with unreadable, complicated code, when we can serve it in 1.05 seconds with readable, clean code? No, it makes no sense.
On the other hand, sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to try to shave off a millisecond from a function, especially when the function is meant to be called thousands of times. Every millisecond you save there means one second saved...
