Idioms facilitate communication

No matter what you think of a computer language, you ought to respect its idioms for the same reason one has to know idioms in a human language—they facilitate communication, which is the true purpose of all languages, programming or otherwise.

George V. Neville-Neil

George also explains that “a single cache miss is more expensive than many instructions, so optimizing away a few instructions is not really going to win your software any speed tests”.