The Problem with Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code

by Adam Barr

I have asked doctors how they were interviewed when they were hired. They say that they were never asked specific medical questions or to perform simple medical procedures; instead, the talk was about how they speak to patients, how they feel about new medicines, and that sort of thing—

Programmers think that design and performance are correlated, such that better design runs faster. In reality, they are frequently inversely correlated: simpler, more elegant designs run slower, and you improve performance by complicating your design with special cases.