This is a balance between three things, arranged in order of increasing importance..

• Performance
• Ease of coding
• Ease of maintenance

Given a goal, a profiler, and a little bit of smarts, it's easy to make a simple program faster. It's usually harder to make a complex program more maintainable.

In a CGI environment, unless you're doing something really complex that requires hundreds of method calls in a tight loop, your bottleneck will probably instead be the cost of forking and execing the program.