Measurement
Because small parts of a program usually consume a disproportionate share of the run time, measure your code to find the hot spots. Once you've found the hot spots and optimized them, measure the code again to assess how much you've improved it. Many aspects of performance are counterintuitive. The earlier case in this chapter, in which 10 lines of code were significantly faster and smaller than one line, is one example of the ways that code can surprise you.
Experience doesn't help much with optimization either. A person's experience might have come from an old machine, language, or compiler—when any of those things changes, all bets ...
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