Indeed. I am just continually amazed at the lack of caution people make when expressing these sentiments

"Never use a ruby string longer than 23 characters!!!"....or you'll just take a slightly less infinitesimal amount of time.

I think the title is meant to be a hook.

so premature optimization in code is evil for more than one reason. First, it obfuscates the code. Second, the slowest processor around is the wetware, and it aint getting any faster. Making it simpler to understand/explain/write/compile/debug will save geometrically more time than it saves in almost every case.