Spirals here. My programming is dominated by efficiency concerns - the whole point is to make it as short as possible, right? It's morally wrong to have waste. And in an information theoretic sense, a more compact representation, by encoding a simpler theory, usually better generalizes over reality - occam's razor (more parsimony.)

And this obsession is also a great weakness of course, because it makes central something that is not central. I have great trouble with some parsing issues (which I think is very algebraic - certainly regular expressions are), because it is just that little bit too complex for me to intuitively grasp the efficiency issues. Instead, I should use (inefficient) algebraic abstraction. But... it's just not quite natural for me, and I just can't quite grasp it.