++ Brother derby! This is exactly the kind of analysis that needs to be done.

The most important thing in the vast majority of coding projects is maintainability, or "How easily can someone who's never seen this code before go in and make a change with a reasonable certainty that nothing else was adversely affected?" The answer to that question determines the code's maintainability.

Run-time analysis is, in my mind, overused. 99.999% of all coding projects do not have a run-time constraint. Yeah, we all want our code to finish NOW, but if it takes 2 seconds instead of 1.8 seconds, that's ok. If adding .2 seconds to its runtime allows a programmer to safely make a change in 5 minutes instead of 2 hours, that's worth it.

Memory constraints should be treated the same way. Most machines are much more powerful hardware-wise than can be used by a reasonable user. Do the right thing for yourself. It's only a machine.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

In reply to Always focus on maintainability... by dragonchild
in thread Style Question: small and modular, or big enough to do the job in one piece? by rah

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.