Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)
Rule 6: Every well-intentioned rule will be bastardized and used to justify horrible code.<p>Foo: <i>"Hey, this 10000-element collection, which we do repeated lookups on... why are we using a list and not a HashSet?"</i><p>Bar: <i>"Because lists are so much simpler than a HashSet. Let's just KISS"</i><p>Foo: <i>"But... doing repeated lookups on a 10k sized list is so much slower than just using a HashSet!"</i><p>Bar: <i>"Oh really? Have you profiled the entire application, and measured the latency impact caused by this decision? Come back to me once you've done so, and until then, we're not going to tune for speed."</i>