2. Implementation Language doesn’t matter
3. If you do not have a visualization for a problem, you will never solve it

Remember what Donald Knuth said, "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

“Most of the fragile insights that laid the foundation of a new vision emerged not when the whole group was together, and not when members worked alone, but when they collaborated and responded to one another in pairs,” he wrote. It took Monet and Renoir, working side by side in the summer of 1869, to develop the style that became Impressionism

Performance and convenience can go hand in hand after all.

add only as little performance as you need

"At some point, you have to make assumptions about the structure of the value in order to use it, and you know what those assumptions are because you wrote the code."

what if i'm using someone else's code, or someone else's data?

Regardless of which version of events is followed, it seems fair to say that some level of intoxication was involved in the development of the maze algorithm.

"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."

Sidley also observed that the maze code was uncommented, and when asked about the 32-byte table said ‘It was a mystery to me too, I couldn’t unscramble it. I just used it to generate the new row at the bottom of the screen.’