Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardw… - Martin Fowler

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is to avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.