Definitely.  I don't know if we have a catchy term for "kneejerk optimization" or if it falls under the broader umbrella of "premature optimization" [including misdirected or unneeded optimization].  

I do think we have the opposite problem, however, in much Haskell code -- people are using the clean, obviously correct, but inefficient code even in standard library functions that really should be optimized like crazy! 

 

Yes, this seems to be a separate disease.  Not just using low-level langs, per se, but using them for *everything*.  I have worked at places in industry where teams automatically use C++ for everything.  For example, they use it for building all complete GUI applications, which surprises me a little bit.  I would have thought in recent years that almost everyone was using *something* else (Java,Python, whatever) to do much of the performance-non-critical portions of their application logic.

 

  -Ryan