As today's code is getting more complex by the minute, code needs to be designed to be maintainable - meaning easy to read, and easy to understand.

That being said, I can't help but remember the programs that ran a couple of years ago such as Winamp or some games in which you needed a high performance program because your 486 100 Mhz wouldn't play mp3s with that beautiful mp3 player which consumed all of your CPU cycles.

Now I run Media Player (or whatever), start playing an mp3 and it eats up a 25-30% of one of my four cores. Come on!! If a 486 can do it, how can the playback take up so much processor to do the same?

I'm a developer myself, and I always used to advise: keep your code simple, don't prematurely optimize for performance. It seems that we've gone from "trying to get it to use the least amount of CPU as possible" to "if it doesn't take too much CPU is all right".

So, do you think we are killing performance by ignoring optimizations?