Ah yes, I read that a while back.

I'd like to see some of the benchmarks he did. He seems to simply tell us that x is faster than y without some proof.

And no, not everything is about speed. I took a big chunk of code(without comments) few days ago and made it into a nifty function which is about half the size of the original block of code, use regular expressions to test certain conditions instead of using substr() on every string 5 times to check if certain sections of the string contained certain characters. Best of all, I added comments, and the readability is through the roof. Adding new checks to the function is dead easy, even Wildhoney could do it.