Chandler Carruth told a similar story in one of his talks.
He met Ken Thompson and saw beautiful C code for the first time because he had encountered a performance problem in a service. The service had to choose a policy to enforce (or something) based on the incoming request. It was taking too long to match the criteria of each potential policy against the request.
Ken wrote a finite automata based pattern matcher that would simultaneously advance through all of the policies' predicates. It was perfect, and it was much faster than the existing code.
Then somebody noticed that 99.9% of requests matched a particular policy, so they changed the existing code to just check that predicate first, and the code sped up a zillion times, much more than with Ken's solution.
He met Ken Thompson and saw beautiful C code for the first time because he had encountered a performance problem in a service. The service had to choose a policy to enforce (or something) based on the incoming request. It was taking too long to match the criteria of each potential policy against the request.
Ken wrote a finite automata based pattern matcher that would simultaneously advance through all of the policies' predicates. It was perfect, and it was much faster than the existing code.
Then somebody noticed that 99.9% of requests matched a particular policy, so they changed the existing code to just check that predicate first, and the code sped up a zillion times, much more than with Ken's solution.