My argument is that 90% of problems can be solved with arrays, 5% of problems can be solved with memoization, 3% of problems can be solved with b-trees, and 2% of problems with other data structures.
It is good to know that solutions to the 2% exists, but what we should be focusing on is writing the simplest code possible which solves the problem and then only optimize afterwards using a profiler.
God forbid you have to work on some codebase written by someone who believes they are the second coming of haskell with crazy recursion and backtracing, monads, red black trees, and a DSL on top of the whole thing.
You are right that many problems can be solved with a single box, but my argument is that you do not need fancy algorithms to solve problems on a single box. We should strive to use single boxes whenever possible to reduce complexity.
Computation is designed by humans to serve humans, we should make it as easy as possible for humans to understand. I’m probably going to start a flamewar here, but this is why simple solutions like UNIX and golang have prevailed in the past. Simple code is easy to understand and therefore it is easy to modify and reason about. Some people think simple means that you decompose programs into the smallest possible functional parts, but simple to me is a 500 line main function.
It is good to know that solutions to the 2% exists, but what we should be focusing on is writing the simplest code possible which solves the problem and then only optimize afterwards using a profiler. God forbid you have to work on some codebase written by someone who believes they are the second coming of haskell with crazy recursion and backtracing, monads, red black trees, and a DSL on top of the whole thing.
You are right that many problems can be solved with a single box, but my argument is that you do not need fancy algorithms to solve problems on a single box. We should strive to use single boxes whenever possible to reduce complexity.
Computation is designed by humans to serve humans, we should make it as easy as possible for humans to understand. I’m probably going to start a flamewar here, but this is why simple solutions like UNIX and golang have prevailed in the past. Simple code is easy to understand and therefore it is easy to modify and reason about. Some people think simple means that you decompose programs into the smallest possible functional parts, but simple to me is a 500 line main function.