I don't think there is a right answer. I would think performance would be more important though. If your code performs very poorly, who cares if it's the most easiest to read code ever. However, code that is really easy to read and expand is also important.

If I had to answer this, I would choose #1 and explain that there both important however, if the code performs poorly then being maintainable doesn't mean anything.

I don't think there is a right answer either. I would say that choice 2 would be my option since I want the code to be quickly fixed for performance issues that are brought up by my customer base.

Great tricky question

My answer would be 2. If I have maintainability, then I can work on incremental performance improvements. Also, if the code is maintainable, it is less likely that I did something stupid performance-wise without realizing it.

I think that's a bad question, and the answers don't provide much comfort either. I'd say maintainability. If it's maintainable, there shouldn't be too many undiscovered bugs that may slow down the application or cause it to crash. So if that were the case, it would most likely run pretty quickly as well, which covers the performance side of it.

So... in a way, you can that maintainability covers the scope of performance, although, backwards, you could have an excellent quick running program that crashes a lot.

If this doesn't cover the question, then the answer can probably be found in the denotation of both words, because that's where most trick questions lie.

By the way, what exam was this for Jordan?

This was a practice test for the Zend PHP Certification. The exam is riddled with trick questions but most have a logical explanation if you think about it. I can't determine the logical answer to this one though.

If it's an essay response, it may be more about HOW you answer the question than which you choose. An answer that indicates the two are inter-related would be the best answer in my book.

I think that always depends on the program and is not very easy to generalise. Some programs have to run really fast, while others need to be easy to maintain.. Those who need both are the real pain...

I'd say maintainability. It's easier to optimise well maintained code. Pre-optimised code is usually slow and impossible to optimise.

I think maintainability is more important. First reason, hardware is cheaper than human hours and secondly, a maintainable code is easier to tune than otherwise.
Cheers!