Where to draw the line - is it possible to love LINQ too much? [closed]

Question

I recently found LINQ and love it. I find lots of occasions where use of it is so much more expressive than the longhand version but a colleague passed a comment about me abusing this technology which now has me second guessing myself. It is my perspective that if a technology works efficiently and the code is elegant then why not use it? Is that wrong? I could spend extra time writing out processes "longhand" and while the resulting code may be a few ms faster, it's 2-3 times more code and therefore 2-3 times more chance that there may be bugs.

Is my view wrong? Should I be writing my code out longhand rather than using LINQ? Isn't this what LINQ was designed for?

Edit: I was speaking about LINQ to objects, I don't use LINQ to XML so much and I have used LINQ to SQL but I'm not so enamoured with those flavours as LINQ to objects.

Answer 1

I have to agree with your view - if it's more efficient to write and elegant then what's a few milliseconds. Writing extra code gives more room for bugs to creep in and it's extra code that needs to be tested and most of all it's extra code to maintain. Think about the guy who's going to come in behind you and maintain your code - they'll thank you for writing elegant easy to read code long before they thank you for writing code that's a few ms faster!

Beware though, this cost of a few ms could be significant when you take the bigger picture into account. If that few milliseconds is part of a loop of thousands of repetitions, then the milliseconds add up fast.