Naive Programming Harms
In a new book, Michael Kay, the author of the Saxon XSLT processor, said:
Books on relational databases don't go out of their way to tell you something that every implementer of a database system knows: The most important way of getting good performance out of the system is simply to write fast code. ... If xt processes the same stylesheet five times faster than Xalan (and it sometimes does), this isn't because it has a better optimizer; it's mainly because James Clark writes very slick code.
The opposite of slick code is naive code. And we write it everyday. And we do it in the name of object-orientation, in the name of patterns, in the name of corporate coding standards, in the name of framework, in the name of the latest buzzword, in the name of flexibility.
And we wonder why our systems are so @#$% slow.
Can you write a function that calculates the sum of all odd integers from 1 to 2n+1?