Up to this point, we worried about learning how to leverage a feature or obtain a result without caring too much about how fast the process would be. Our only goals were correctness and readability.
In this chapter, we are going to steer towards a completely different concern—performance. However, we will find that often an improvement in performance will result in degradation of readability. When we are modifying something to make it faster, we are probably making it easier for the machine to understand, and therefore, we are probably compromising on human readability.
On December 4, 1974, Donald Knuth, the author of the famous book The Art of Computer Programming, wrote the paper Structured Programming with go-to statements. This well-known quote is extracted from the paper:
"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually...