Clean Code and Speed: Not Either/Or

Casey Muratori's "Clean Code, Horrible Performance" article claims that object-oriented programming necessarily sacrifices performance. This is a false dichotomy. I demonstrate this by first analyzing the maintenance and extensibility costs of his optimized code examples, then by creating an alternative solution that achieves 75x performance improvement while maintaining clean object-oriented principles. The key insight: separate data collection from computation through a collector pattern that preserves OOP interfaces while enabling SIMD vectorization. Modern software engineering doesn't force us to choose between clean code and performance—strategic architectural decisions can deliver both.