I walked into a case like this the other day

It's more than that. The way black box composition is done in modern software, your n=100 code (say, a component) gets reused into a another thing somewhere above, and now you're being iterated through m=100 times. Oops, now n=10k Generally, Casey seems to preach holistic thinking, finding the right mental model and just write the most straightforward code (which is harder than it looks; people get distracted in the gigantic state space of solutions all the time). However this requires 1. a small team of 2. good engineers. Folks argue that this isn't always feasible, which is true, but the point of these presentations is to spread the coding patterns & knowledge to train the next gen of engineers to be more aware of these issues and work toward said smaller team & better engineers direction, knowing that we might never reach it. Most modern patterns (and org structures) don't incentivize…

There was a fun example in the Julia compiler around a year ago. Part of the compiler was O(N^2) in `let` block nesting depth. That is let x = foo(), y = y, z = 2y ... end would be a depth of 3. It didn't seem like that should be a problem, N is never going to be 10, let alone 100, right? Until suddenly, `N` was in the thousands in some critical generated code spit out by some modeling software, so that handling the scoping introduced by `let` suddenly dominated the compilation time...