There's tons of backlash here as if people think better performance requires writing in assembly.

But to anyone complaining, I want to know, when was the last you pulled out a profiler? When was the last time you saw anyone use a profiler?

People asking for performance aren't pissed you didn't write Microsoft Word in assembly we're pissed it takes 10 seconds to open a fucking text editor.

I literally timed it on my M2 Air. 8s to open and another 1s to get a blank document. Meanwhile it took (neo)vim 0.1s and it's so fast I can't click my stopwatch fast enough to properly time it. And I'm not going to bother checking because the race isn't even close.

I'm (we're) not pissed that the code isn't optional, I'm pissed because it's slower than dialup. So take that Knuth quote you love about optimization and do what he actually suggested. Grab a fucking profiler, it is more important than your Big O

I'm so interested in this topic, for a weird reason.

Since I was a kid, I've thought I was "prone to migraines", and ascribed various triggers to them - sun exposure, heat, physical exertion, mental exertion, etc. I'd get a migraine sometimes after a long hike on a weekend - and also a long business meeting entirely indoors in an air-conditioned space.

Only when I was around 35, did I figure something out. All these situations lead to me getting dehydrated without any obvious accompanying feeling of thirst. Hiking all day will do it - walking around an outdoor shopping mall on a hot afternoon - or sitting in an all-day business meeting focused on the work at hand and forgetting to drink. And all these situations lead to a migraine - my only "migraine" trigger is simple dehydration, nothing more complicated.

The weird thing is, it took me a long time (decades) to put this together, because I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty, and I had no association between "feeling thirsty" and getting a migraine.

I get what I consider normally thirsty in other circumstances, but somehow there's a failure mode where my body doesn't warn me. So now I just remember to chug lots of water (and electrolytes) if I'm exerting myself even if I don't really feel thirsty, and I can systematically avoid triggering migraines.

Now that I understand it the association is quite clear and obvious in retrospect.

3 emojis in the first paragraph is where I close the tab.

I agree that it's unnecessary, and Python's success despite not having private members/fields is testament to that. But public/private fields/methods, like pretty much everything in OOP, is a 'social' rather than engineering innovation. Just as a class tells you certain operations and data are inter-related, private methods or fields signal to a class's users that you probably will break things if you interfere with certain parts.

Otherwise, at least in C++, you can often bypass the private specifier without much difficulty. Perhaps the laziest and easiest way to do so is

    #define private public
    #include "foo.hpp"
    #undef private