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, ...

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