When I was growing up in the early 90's, and even before that, programmers had to squeeze every little drop of performance from the system they were coding on, all while keeping the memory foot print as small as they could make it. Computers just did not have the sort of power they do now, and it took clever tricks to pull off certain features. Now, you don't see a lot of that, or at least, I don't. It seems like everything is made in such a way that you really ought to have a dual Xeon machine or it won't run.
This practice of coding intelligently is a thing of the past, or at least, I hope its not, because a lot of the time, it seems so. You used to allocate memory and use what you allocated, freeing it up when no longer needed. Tight code is elegant code in my opinion, but now with high level languages doing all the work for you, and the internet being this all-in-one compendium for anything and everything you want to do, people just don't bother. The stuff on the net doesn't teach these practices, and people learn from those articles, and not bashing them, but you used to often times have a mentor. I have a mentor, that person teaches me even though they must, god I hope must realize by now that I always will suck at programming, even though I do get better, I don't have a knack for it like some folks do. But my mentor never had to say to me this is what you do, you have to try to make your code as compact as possible, while maintaining the functionality. It's just common sense to me.
So after unsuccessfully attempting to create a poll, again I will just write the question out:
When do you think about performance and optimization?
a. I don't know, I let the language worry about that.
b. From the very first line of code onwards
c. It's not my problem, if your shittop cant run my software, fuck you, get a better machine, pleb.
d. I think about it, but I don't know how to write better code or I would.