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Software Engineering

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    Only if the cost, it terms of your bullet points, is greater than the amortized value delivered. Often complexity introduces value, and in these cases one can encapsulate it such that it passes your criteria. It also gets reused and continues to provide more value. Commented Oct 17, 2008 at 10:36
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    Those first two points are the main ones to me, with the fourth point being a negative consequence of doing premature optimization. In particular, it is a red flag whenever I see someone re-implementing features from a standard library. Like, I once saw someone implement custom routines for string manipulation because he was concerned that the built-in commands were too slow. Commented May 29, 2011 at 12:47
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    Making code thread safe is not optimization. Commented May 1, 2012 at 22:47