UNIX Philosophy

    * Rule 1: You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
    * Rule 2: Measure. Do not tune for speed until you have measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
    * Rule 3: Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
    * Rule 4: Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they are much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
    * Rule 5: Data dominates. If you have chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.
    * Rule 6: There is no Rule 6.

>>20
Which is a load of bullshit.  There are too many ways to do things, and requirements change over the years, hardware performance changes over time (from loop unrolling destroying cache space, to multicore now speeding up different things), to say "the best will be obvious".  Seriously, the inventors of Unix were at the fucking newbie stage of computing.