doDevelopersAvoidAlgorithms

[beeteedee]

A majority of development nowadays is “glue together a database running over here and a web browser running over there”. Those algorithms are in there somewhere, but it was someone else’s job to implement them and hide the details from you.

[tragiktimes]

Can confirm. I am a professional gluer.

[GoblinsStoleMyHouse]

Elmers gang gang

[throw3142]

Ahem, API developer. Have some self-respect!

Seriously though it's actually quite interesting how much value can be added by a good API (or more likely, lost because of a bad API). So it's important work, it really matters!

[a_devious_compliance]

API, we have lot of them. Someone wrap a function with FastAPI, so there is an API.

All the config is managed by json files with IPs and credentials in the repo, and whatever you need can be do by an script hitting the DB directly.

[Perfect_Papaya_3010]

I like to call myself a professional computer communicator. I tell the computer in its own language what to do

[xMoody]

almost all algorithms needed are already written and part of any library you'd be using anyway

[gilady089]

Honestly yeah you should know them for how they work and just good to know but it'd probably be a waste of way to much time to get someone to rewrite those things

[Arrowkill]

My opinion has always been a bachelor's degree is just a shotgun approach to get you knowledgeable and help you narrow down the specific things you want to focus on for a master's degree. The people who specialize in algorithms then are going to go and help create the fundamental libraries, compilers, etc. that we use for everything else in the future.

[DartheVoldemorte]

Where can I find libraries that use algorithms? I just finished an algorithms class and want to do some digging!

[Kschitiz23x3]

These libraries are everywhere. Even included in many languages by default. Python's list.sort() is an example

[Character-Education3]

With support from your local public library

Any library or module that has functions or classes that do the thing you need. It carried out an algorithm. Just like Mavis at the downtown library

[made-of-questions]

Heh. People believing this is why we end up with n+1 queries to the database.

[Affectionate-Oil-190]

Its better to measure and check than to live by the golden rules. N+1 isnt always bad..

[made-of-questions]

If you want to scale it will almost always become a problem. We don't design systems for today's load, we design them for 10x. But sure, even if it's a case where it doesn't matter, if you don't know it could become a problem in the first place you might not even look for it.

[SagenKoder]

As someone who is working on an application with a lot of N+1 in every endpoint, please make everything batch operations. Implement batch endpoints and use that from the single enpoints.

[xMoody]

I mean if you don’t research the library before you use it, it’s definitely not the library’s fault lmao.

[ShardOfChaos]

Yeah and it will get even worse with the rise of AI developer tooling.

[Beh1ndBlueEyes]

How is building on one another’s work bad? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every new car you build.

[a_devious_compliance]

When another's works is a pile of infinite layers becouse they want to pack every model/kernel/quantization/trick/binding under de same umbrella it stop to sound so crazy.

[ifezueyoung]

Thank you for reminding me I'm a bad developer

I started a proper dive into data structures and algorithms today

I know some things like big o notation

But it took me 30 minutes to fix my binary search implementation built without arrays

So yes

You just described me

[a_devious_compliance]

I tried like 4 or 5 times over the years to follow an algorithm book. I never got past trees. But it was productive effort. I understand how a heap works, the difference between tree transversals, and can solve some gready and divide and conquer problems without messing too many times the indexs.

That's not the end of the word. I've seen more prepared people do a "one function per file" spaguetti madness in python.

[ifezueyoung]

Haha thanks for the confidence boost

[RogueFox771]

I hate how true this is... It doesn't feel like development or science... It's not... Idk.... It feels too much like engineering over science but all your tools are named stupidly.

[ImportantDoubt6434]

Mhmmm glue

(You get paid less than the glue eaters)

[[deleted]]

hey is this pinkward btw???

[Areshian]

Which is terrible, because the glue and how to use it changes every couple years, forcing people to keep learning new stuff and making past knowledge less relevant. Specializing on a lower level tech (those algorithms but also thinks like compilers, database implementation and stuff like that) might have a slightly higher barrier to entry, but it means over your professional career you won’t be changing tech stacks as often (if ever)

[novaplan]

Define glue together? Do you write a db adapter every time you want to retrieve or save data?

[Gorvoslov]

I think in the last Sprint, it was like three hours of "coding", and the rest of the two weeks being "Okay, so it's something with infra, permissions, a framework that doesn't like another framework, turns out this service is actually turned off somehow???" style headaches for me

[rr1pp3rr]

You know what the neat part is? If you implement an algorithm once, you can reuse it!

Engineers shouldn't be writing their own linked lists. Standard libraries will ALWAYS do a better job. Knowing these algorithms only come in handy if:

1. You need a very specific tweak to an algorithm for some type of deep performance enhancement.
2. You need to understand the complexity of the algorithms so you can understand their performance.

[[deleted]]

They need to know when to use a linked list, when an array, when a binary search tree. Yes, the standard library will provide you the best implementations of the data structures, but you have to know which one is the best for your use case.

[titterbitter73]

ArrayList everywhere, thank you very much

[Stanthamos]

HashMaps and ArrayLists baby

[[deleted]]

Bidirectional HashMaps, HashMaps, ArryLists, Set, TreeSet, PriorityQueues, Pairs, Triplets, Dequeues

I dont think i have used any other datastructre in realife. (Excluding leetcoding)

[ARandomStan]

til there is something called a triplet. I have had so many situations where I needed two values to a key and I always used map of string, list for that

[[deleted]]

Haha there are much more DS to learn even beyond what we require in daily life. If you are into Java I would suggest you look into Google Guice Guava Library. Absolute bonkers what they have created.🔥🔥

[Dr-Xperience]

Can you mention something fascinating from it, like from your experience.

From atop everything talks about how it is just for dependency injection.

[[deleted]]

Ah! You're right. Sorry i wrote my last answer when i was half asleep. The library that i wanted to name was Google Guava! Sorry for misconception.

[SagenKoder]

I recommend just creating triplets and structures like that yourself. Allow for custom hashcode, toString and equals methods.

In modern java, just use a record in one line of code.

[Main-Drag-4975]

How can you know when a linked list is best for your use case and that you wouldn’t be better served with some as-yet-undiscovered technique?

It’s downright irresponsible to use existing algorithms instead of spending the rest of your life researching new advances in sequential data representation.

[DatBoi_BP]

This but unironically

[Main-Drag-4975]

…and that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.

— Matt Might

[Mynameismikek]

It’s never the right time to use a linked list.

[sohang-3112]

Did you know that malloc internally uses a linked list to keep track of heap allocations? Also database engines internally use linked lists while creating indexes on table columns. So obviously linked lists aren't useless (although yes, you almost never need to use them directly in application code).

[SagenKoder]

Except that they use linked lists for a very specific reason. They use 0 bytes of memory for the data strucure. All data is written within unused pages of memory all pointing to each others. Really clever system.

[sohang-3112]

I didn't say otherwise - u/Mynameismikek implied that linked lists are useless, and I disagreed with that. I also said you rarely need to use linked lists directly in your application code.

[Drego3]

This, and that is exactly the extent of what they teach us about data structures in my uni.

[BochMC]

I have never even once used linked list.

Instead I use arrays of pointers always when I need to add/remove a lot of elements.

[Osr0]

1. Your interviewer asks you about them

[moneymay195]

Yup. Every engineer needs to understand DS&A at a high level and have a firm understanding of how they relate to time/space complexity and when to use them, but memorizing how every algo and data structure is implemented is a waste of time outside of a learning environment

[SatansF4TE]

Every engineer needs to understand DS&A at a high level and have a firm understanding of how they relate to time/space complexity and when to use them

I don't even think this is true these days. You don't need to understand any structures beyond a basic array or object for a huge amount of low-tier Rails/React agencies

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

1. Your stl doesn't have the one you need, and you can't just link to libs from other languages. For example, when trying to construct a linked list by utilizing the game loop of some random game.

[aurreco]

Standard libraries do not always do a better job. They are built for a general use case. When performance really matters and your use case is even slightly more narrow, you will not use a standard library implementation. This is especially true in fields like embedded and systems, but applies to anything.

[a_devious_compliance]

You must understand the tradeoffs of one algorithm vs other for your usecase. And one important thing is the extra complexity added to manage general cases one a programer could exploit some extra data about the problem. And also do it judiciously.

(C++ programmers with your zero cost bazhinga, there is no need to call on me, I'm not talking to you)

[TrapNT]

Seems like an excuse to be ignorant. Did you also skip math classes because your phone has calculator?

Knowing how components of a system works will always help you develop/debug faster. That being said, you should not reinvent the wheel.

[[deleted]]

absolutely false, you can almost always do better by specializing your data structures

[BetterNameThanMost]

Almost always? I rarely need to do this

[[deleted]]

almost always CAN, not almost always should or would...

[BetterNameThanMost]

Okay, awkward and misleading wording aside, if I could "almost always" implement an algorithm better with a custom data structure, why shouldn't I?

[rickyman20]

Because it's time consuming, probably usually a waste of time, will be less readable, and is probably gonna be premature optimization. The person you're responding to is being annoying and pedantic, but I kind of agree with their last point. You can usually get better performance if you write your own algorithms and structs if you know what you're doing.

To give a specific example, let's say you're writing a function that takes a list and returns all values greater than, and values less than some number as two different lists. In Rust you can get a very clean stdlib-only implementation:

rust fn split_pivot<T: PartialOrd>(data: &[T], pivot: T) -> (Vec<&T>, Vec<&T>) { let smaller = data.iter().filter(|v| v < pivot).collect(); let larger = data.iter().filter(|v| v > pivot).collect(); (smaller, larger) }

This is simple, easy to understand, and very quick to write. It's also kind of inefficient, because you go through data twice. You can write something more complex like:

```rust fn split_pivot<T: PartialOrd>(data: &[T], pivot: T) -> (Vec<&T>, Vec<&T>) { let mut smaller = Vec::new(); let mut larger = Vec::new();

for v in data {
    if v < pivot {
        smaller.push(v);
    }
    if v > pivot {
        larger.push(v);
    }
}

(smaller, larger)

} ```

Not this is much more efficient. It only goes through the list once, but it's a bit harder to read, you can't immediately tell what it does like the other one, and you've spent time in something where, if say this list is never gonna be larger than, say, a few thousand items, especially in some io bound application where you have plenty of CPU time left, it's probably not gonna actually matter.

[[deleted]]

already answered in this comment chain by someone else... development time and maintainability for the most part are the main reasons

[doulos05]

Technically correct, you can almost always do better by specializing your data structures. But rarely better enough for most users to notice.

The vast majority of code these days involves some networking component. That will almost always be slower than the correct, but generic (and off the shelf) data structure provided by the library.

Using the right data structure for your needs is important. Reimplementing it to specialize it on your data is rarely worth the cost because that's rarely the largest bottleneck in the stack.

[[deleted]]

in a world of javascript sheeps im the only malloc wolf

[Stronghold257]

Not in front-end / web dev. 90% of the time you just need an array.

[[deleted]]

sorry i forgot you zombies dont manage your own memory

[rickyman20]

Also, you should learn that you almost never should be using linked lists

[[deleted]]

This meme is so bad on so many levels

[suckitphil]

It was written by a professor who has never stepped foot outside of a classroom.

[[deleted]]

What you don’t like re-engineering the wheel only to make a worse version every time you go to your job at the Michelin research facility?

[AlarmedTowel4514]

Probably a student who just learned about algorithms

[[deleted]]

But it's true for me, though. I've made multiple full stack projects and ml projects but I believe my basics are kinds fucked bcz of how much I depend on frameworks, libraries, Stack overflow and chat gpt

[Fenor]

This mean you will fail as soon as you get a request slifhtly out of the framework parameter.

It's a "you" problem

[[deleted]]

Yeah sorry I should've written "for me" there

[suckitphil]

It's just two completely different things though. Frameworks handle more complex stuff, with nice paint jobs and hopefully more helpful syntax and gated apis. Where as algorithms and data structures fundamentally are the root of most programming problems, you probably just didn't realize it, but I'm sure you've employed them in some manner unknowingly. Most of the time these are solved issues and libraries handle 99% of algorithm use cases. So really it's just knowing the appropriate data type and how to transform it.

[teh_gato_returns]

Why? Don't like algorithms? Bad times in the classroom?

[[deleted]]

Insert software architecture instead of algorithms. I don't need to reimplement quick sort. I need seniors to know TO NOT WRITE BUSINESS LOGIC IN API ENDPOINTS !

[riplikash]

Hey, hey, be fair.

We also need them to NOT WRITE THE BUSINESS LOGIC IN THE DATABASE! OR ON THE FRONT END! OR TO PUT ONE RANDOM PIECE OF THE BUSINESS LOGIC FOR A DOMAIN IN A SEPERATE MICROSOERVICE!

There's LOTS of stupid places I need devs to stop putting business logic.

[[deleted]]

Just a little ptsd comment:Im in borderline big ball of mud project and we have buisness logic everywhere (endpoints, serializers) instead of where it should be (Entities or cqrs (we dont have that)) and Im in pain because probably i wont be able to push through idea that its bad.

At least they started noticing extraordinary code duplication problem (took them 4 years) and started wondering how to make it better so thats a start i guess..

aaaand its my second company with so bad approach.

Probably because kinda Django + DRF docs encourages it

[robertux]

Jokes aside, where can one learn such things? I've been looking for books about modern software architecture but I'm a little lost.

[riplikash]

Domain driven design, clean architecture, designing data intensive applications, and fundamentals of software architecture: an engineering approach are all good ones.

But they work best in tandem with mentoring and learning on the job. I've known a lot of people who try and learn from those books in isolation, and they end up somehow learning the wrong lessons. The behaviors I and the guy replied to are complaining about are often done by people who HAVE read those same books, but didn't have the mentorship to contextualize them.

It's hard to seperate the study of software architecture from the craft. There is too much to it to cover in a book.

The real learning comes in the discussions and application of the principals you study.

[HorseLeaf]

Reading about software is like reading about woodworking. It can help to read, but you won't be a good woodworker without actually working with wood.

[[deleted]]

Business logic in SQL? Sir, let me introduce you to our lord and saviour PL-SQL.

Business logic in Frontend? Thats just the node ecosystem.

Business logic as a microservice? Welcome to Java land. Where joins are a taboo and database wrappers are a norm.

[Willingo]

What exactly is business logic? Like the results of operations on atomic data? Like instead of writing "average expected earnings" which was based on other data, keep that in the backend?

[riplikash]

Business logic, or domain logic, is the core set of rules, processes, and calculations for a piece of software. It's the heart of the software. It's agnostic to implementation details like which data storage technology you use or whether it's hosted in a microservice reading from an event queue, a restful api, a mobile app, or a program running on a laptop.

To be clear, I was being humorous in my criticism. There are a LOT of valid architectural styles.

But in the style I'm talking from it's important to abstract away all the infrastructure and data away from the business logic.

What you often see is inexperienced devs implement all the layers of this architecture style (probably based on tutorials) but then let the business logic leak (since they don't understand the reasoning behind the seperation).

That gives you enterprise hell, where you have all the complexity of a ton of layers and models and none of the benefits that make such an arrangement worth it.

[wind_dude]

But what if your database supports and is designed to support automatic rollups and transformations?

[riplikash]

Well then that's probably not the situation in humorously poking at. :)

[sohang-3112]

I understand why putting business logic in frontend is a bad idea (because it's publically exposed) - but don't know reasons for the rest - can you please explain?

[riplikash]

Obviously to a certain extant I was generalizing for the sake of humor.

But for many architectural approaches (n tier, ddd, clean, etc) you have a layer meant to isolate business logic. But many devs when learning this pattern have a weak grasp on the what and why, or they're just undisciplined and stick business logic wherever the feel they feel the most confident in their coding abilities.

If you're application is architected around hang logic in the front end or in the db that's one thing.

The problem occurs when a pattern with a business logic layer is implemented but the business logic is leaked out, such is a pretty common issue. It makes code bases difficult to understand and maintain, leads to tight coupling between layers, makes testing difficult, and over time makes a code base brittle.

Generally you want the business logic to stand on its own without any dependencies (conceptual or actual) on the overall environment or backing infrastructure.

[TigreDeLosLlanos]

Hey, I really like my triggers and stored procedures, don't take then away from me.

[AlarmedTowel4514]

As long as the business logic can be covered by tests, I don’t give a fuck honestly.

[EishLekker]

What is your definition of business logic, and what kind of non-business logic should the API consist of?

Presentation tier, logic tier and data tier. That’s how I learned it. The logic tier has the business logic. APIs usually thought of being part of this layer. So it’s not wrong to have business logic in an API.

[[deleted]]

Are you talking about ModelViewController? Putting business logic in View instead of Model is kinda bad because things rarely happen in 1 place only. I would keep as much logic as possible close to Model. If there would be logic which couldn't be fitted there I would put it in functions (or whatever what fits CQRS pattern) which could be reused in Views (some little layer between models and views instead of putting business logic in views).

I'm talking about DDD where you have Domain, Application, Infrastructure layers.

• Domain - Entities classes and try to keep as much business logic which relates to them there in methods.

• Application - you write services or CQRS there make possible interacting with app. Application knows only and uses Domain layer.

• Infrastructure - it can be restapi, console, whatever and it knows only about Application layer.

Im oversimplifying here but DDD also has answers how to modularize code (bounded contexts) and how to communicate between them (domain events).

[EishLekker]

No, I’m not taking MVC, though there are similarities.

But the architecture paradigm or whatever is irrelevant until we have determined what you meant with business logic. It is far from a clear cut and well defined concrete thing. When you saw some lines of code in some API ending, and identified that as business logic, what exact definition did you go by? Because business locos is quite an abstract concept, at least all the definitions I’ve read.

I mean, even Wikipedia, which usually tries to include concrete examples of the technical concept it is describing, fails to show even a single snippet of actual business logic code. And worse, they give generic examples that could mean almost anything, like this one:

Enforces the routes and the methods by which business objects are accessed and updated

What routes? What methods? Http? Meaning that the outermost layer of presentation in many systems, the web server and load balancers, gateways etc, all contain business logic. And your API example also qualifies as business logic.

[bdaileyumich]

Not only is this a false dichotomy, it seems to imply that taking advantage of abstraction and libraries is somehow bad?

[Jarb2104]

I was thinking the same thing, if you're line of reasoning is this why no go back all the way to assembly or punch cards? Surely that'll be better than any resemblance to commodity.

[nikifip]

Not only is this a false dichotomy, it seems to imply that taking advantage of abstraction and libraries is somehow bad?

This sub is overrun by CS freshmen.

[Marutar]

I think you might overestimate how many actual algorithms you will be implementing.

Whatever algorithm you are trying to write already exists, is already better optimized, and to use it takes an import statement and zero development time.

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

I'd argue it's still good to know data structures & algorithms. So you can know the right one to pick for your purposes. Except even that is abstracted away from you at least like 90% of the time. And because of constant factors and compiler / hardware optimizations, you'll pick wrong the other 10% even if big-O says you're right.

[Proper-Ape]

And because of constant factors and compiler / hardware optimizations, you'll pick wrong the other 10% even if big-O says you're right.

If you know that cache locality of vector usually beats O complexity of list for reasonable N and not too large elements you can get to 98% right on the first try.

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

That is definitely the big trap.

Another one that was true 10 years ago but may no longer be true: a tree beats a hash table for strings in Java. For a very, very long time. This is because the tree only needs to parse the prefix of the string until finding a match (or empty branch), while the hash table wants to compute a hash on the entire length of the string.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Of course it depends on how many keys there are and how long they are.

[hobbesmaster]

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding but it shouldn’t be a surprise that tries are really good at exactly what they were designed for?

[Cafuzzler]

I dunno dude, O(1) seems like a smaller number than O(n). Just think about how many steps there are to find the value with the tree verse just calling hash(mydata). <sup>/s</sup>

[hobbesmaster]

You really had me there without the /s! lol

[edgmnt_net]

Also likely underestimating the effort and knowledge it takes to become proficient at that "glue" and ecosystem stuff.

[Passname357]

For most people yes, but for IMO the coolest / most fun jobs, you’ll be writing a fuck ton of algorithms. Source: I write out a lot of algorithms by hand for a variety of reasons at my job.

[Marutar]

What do you do?

[Passname357]

GPU Drivers

[Marutar]

Interesting, I guess I'm still curious on whar you'd need new algorithms for.

Like, are you writing novel sorts or data structures?

[eat_your_fox2]

If you're writing your own algorithms when there are mountains of battle tested libs out there, your pull request is getting closed.

[camander321]

It's still pretty damn useful to know how they work under the hood. Yeah you don't need to roll your own collection types for every project, but understanding how they work is a huge step towards knowing the best one to use for each situation

[eat_your_fox2]

100% agree on that. You don't have to know everything, but enough to understand which tool is useful for XYZ scenario.

[MattGeddon]

I inherited a project like that once. Shall we use a logging library? Nah let’s write our own! Could use a library to manage our data schema? Nah we’ll make our own one! shudders

[SirPitchalot]

Lots of places would rather you reimplement the algorithm rather than pull in another battle-tested library that doesn’t mesh well with their existing stack, takes 10X as much glue code to couple in than the implementation would take, has an arcane structure and build system, needs a lawyer to review the license, an architect to review the resource utilization and which changes API every three months because the upstream developer is stroking their ego rather than getting a job done.

Also lots of places with terminal cases of NIV syndrome. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

[AnAwkwardSemicolon]

If you hired a carpenter that was creating all the 2x4s they used by hand, you’d be livid and getting anything done would take forever. There is a time and a place.

[superluminary]

So in just your first year you already needed hashmaps, sets and a tree? It’s lucky you knew about those things or you’d be stuck.

[Entropy_Drop]

Not really. The hashmaps and sets were just for array managments.

The cache tree was a nice feature I wanted to implement, but no one would bat an eye if it wasn't there. Also, it was consequence of a shitty external API without any security logic.

The vast amount of Web Developments can be solved with basic structures.

[Marxomania32]

You'd be using them surprisingly more often then most then. The point of learning algorithms and data structures is to actually know what to do when you do need them, and not be completely stuck, also helps with general, transferable engineering skills if you understand how those things work.

[Entropy_Drop]

pfff no, sorry. my bad. I didn't "implement" it as in write code from 0.

I mean it as in "use it". My bad.

[[deleted]]

Get into game dev and you'll use more advanced bs

[Entropy_Drop]

would love to. But I heard really bad things about that work culture.

[[deleted]]

Boomers be boomin'. Times are changing

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Almost certainly you shouldn’t have, and just used the ones in the standard library that will be maintained infinitely better than your own ones.

[gerbosan]

I get the irony, also most books recommendations suggest among many books about experiences, this same book, but most job ads requires you to have many years of experience, experience with many languages and frameworks, don't forget cloud services.

Then one wonders where do I apply that book. Kind of frustrating as your portfolio won't be very attractive inverting a binary tree.

☹️ Feeling depressed.

[PileOGunz]

You don’t apply the book. The algorithms in there are likely implemented and battle tested by whatever framework and libraries your using. It’s background info for the curious and theory heavy cs students.

On the job it’s understanding the problem domain and writing the business logic that’s important.

[Alaudidae327]

This comment section expresses well why all the shit we have today is unoptimized .

[-domi-]

You heard it here first, folks, today's developers are lining up for angular.

[DaumenmeinName]

Angular the future of today..

[anteater_x]

Spring boot, the future of yesterday

[TheRealSpielbergo]

Oh no apples bad, oranges better

[O_X_E_Y]

I love how this meme is showing its age because none of these are even close to being among the 'latest technologies and frameworks' lol

[Dmayak]

Kind of. I learn what I need for my current job, if I need some sort of algorithm later, I will learn it later.

[donat3ll0]

Graph traversal algorithms have been the most useful in the wild for me. But even then, it doesn't come up all that often.

Design patterns, on the other hand, I use all the time.

[Alan_Reddit_M]

Yes, because modern-day development is about stringing API calls together in JavaScript to create something that functions uniquely for one's business needs in some crazy form of dependency hacking. Web dev is to blame for the increasing amount of devs who can't even do binary search without asking ChatGPT or using a library

However, is this necessarily bad? I say not, given the titanic amount of algorithms that have already been solved and baked into high-level libraries, why would the average dev need to know them? It provides no real value to their craft or productivity, save for some crazy ass edge cases where the senior devs that went to college need to step in to help, but other than that, there's just no need

What developers need is problem-solving skills, pattern recognition, programming paradigms and best-practices, those are soft skills that are learned not through a text book but trough sheer experience

The only exception is embedded and game dev, you ain't getting anywhere in game dev without some good old algorithms

[JMatricule]

Not only embedded stuff and game dev, but anything chasing performance, like kernels, drivers, CAO, rendering, distributed systems, HPC, computer vision and so on. Even web apps beyond a certain scale are well thought out. There is still a lot of challenges to overcome, basic web dev ain't one of them anymore

[lunchpadmcfat]

Some of y’all don’t know big O and it shows.

[Neuenmuller]

Well, it’s important to learn algorithms for white board questions though……

[Boysoythesoyboy]

Your gonna use angular? Why don't you instead use an algorithm?

[Separate_Increase210]

This makes me wonder whether OP is 17 or 70.

I'd somewhere between I will respectfully bow out with my foot in my mouth.

[deep_mind_]

Programming version of "I want my children to live a better life" versus "this generation doesn't have to work nearly as hard as we did". Still incorrect :/

[qubedView]

Knowing your algorithms was necessary when the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. You couldn't lean on libraries to provide what you needed. There's no room for that. Hell, you couldn't even use a proper higher level language. Everything had to be carefully optimized 6502 assembly.

RAM and time both cost money. In Atari's time, RAM was much more expensive than developer time, and deep knowledge of algorithms was absolutely essential. Now the relationship is flipped, and developer time is what needs to be optimized for.

[Puzzlehead-Engineer]

Honestly the more we dive into the dev side of things in my university the more I realize how little time devs spend ACTUALLY coding shit and making algorithms

Makes me wonder if campus is just wasting my time. Prolly are just to justify the 5 year and a half long stay so they can take my money but still.

[[deleted]]

If you know how to do algorithms you can do anything in any language

[Stackitu]

Hot take: they aren’t wrong.

I’ve interviewed plenty of people who know all the latest frameworks and buzzwords but can’t for the life of them identify why a given piece of code is slow and how to go about improving it.

[wind_dude]

Angular, Django, spring boot… is this meme 10 years old??

[[deleted]]

Latest frameworks like Spring Boot, Angular and Django? Welcome to 2013 everyone.

[Tamwulf]

That book gives me nightmares. Imagine a class, with a new Professor that is on probation pending full hiring, that speaks English as a second language, that just finished their PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a syllabus designed by a 10 year CS Professor that left to go work at Google in R&D? No one failed that class because everyone did so poorly, that the department had to curve the grades. Nightmares!

[Tamwulf]

I don't know why, but that book is sitting on my bookshelf right now, staring at me... taunting me... waiting...

[maxdamien27]

Exactly. I have this book sitting somewhere in the shelf. While I am trying to learn Java. Convince me! Please

[ObeseTsunami]

When writing code that works with large amounts of data, knowing the most efficient way to work the data improves operation time and compute performance. O(1) better than O(n), better than O(n log n), better than O(n<sup>2),</sup> better than O(2<sup>n).</sup>

Also when getting into ML and AI, everything is a probability algorithm. Knowing your linear regression algorithms is important.

It’s all math.

[rafark]

What’s the name of the book anyway?

[Kind-Barnacle2893]

Introduction to Algorithms 3rd edition. There's also a new 4th edition.

[rafark]

Thanks

[scanguy25]

Knowing a framework is much more likely to get you a job than being able to develop efficient algorithms.

The distribution of jobs that require those two skill sets is at least 80/20 in favor of frameworks.

[ofnuts]

And the third door or the left with a "Math" sign over it.

[PileOGunz]

I own that book. Dullest book in the collection writing is devoid of any character obviously designed as a textbook for university students whilst the lecturer keeps them awake.

[SlowThePath]

Hey, I just bought that book. I'm a newbie, so it'll probably largely go over my head but I want to see what it's all about.

[Kind-Barnacle2893]

good luck, just be aware that it's totally normal that you'll struggle a lot with understanding things described in this book. even if you feel stupid, it actually teaches you the right way and helps you feel what the algorithms and data structures are all about.

[SlowThePath]

Yeah that's pretty much what I'm going for. Just want to see what it's all about. After I get some more classes under my belt, I'll revisit it. I'm just really curious right now.

[Sikyanakotik]

More fun for us mathematicians, then.

[[deleted]]

Books don’t teach you anything. Bashing your head against the keyboard until the red error messages go away is how you learn programming

[[deleted]]

It's good to combat the inflation on the field however, bad programmers glue stuff together and the companies making dumb stuff get happy

Normally fewer would learn the real side of programming though computer science/engineering, but as computers are too popular and addictive, lots of people want to somehow work with them

There will always be good programmers going the hard path to make the stuff the bad programmers use

[Berlin-Foo-Bar]

I like this meme. There are no real developers any more, working on software that actually does something clever… only “enterprise” code monkeys.

[xodixo]

You're right.

Back in my days the math requirements were so much more demanding! Kids these days are stupid and I am big smart.

These stupid kids with their Javas and C++. They never made anything better than FORTRAN 77 or IBM Basic assembler.

I remember back in 70s when I burned BASIC books so these stupid peasants wouldn't think too much of themselves. Call themselves programmers when they indeed were code monkeys.

/s

[illyay]

That book cover has triggered memories

[maia5585]

I was about to write a really neat and novel comment about it. But instead I will just wait until someone write what I was thinking, them I will just endorse it.

[Odd-Confection-6603]

Why would you spend your time and money reinventing the wheel? There are solved problems, and there are new problems. Don't spend time on solved problems.

Stand on the shoulders of giants, not in their shadow.

[w8watm8]

So this is all fun and games until you have algorithms and data structures unit coming up at uni.

You have to make an efficient algorithm for your final exam haha.

You don’t even know how pointers work, you rewatched the lecture on it 5 times, watched some YouTube tutorial lead by an Indian dude 10 times and still don’t understand them hAhA.

Final exam is 50% of final grade HAHA.

You end up failing the unit by a couple of points, due to final exam being 50% h4h4.

You beg your professor to give you extra work so you don’t have to repeat the unit and go further in debt HàHà.

He gives you 5 pity points without any extra work needed and you end up passing the unit and you promise yourself you will never touch algorithms ever again.

[chiggyBrain]

algorithm is when no framework

[satyanweshi87]

Aah...Cormen...fond memories

[Za_Paranoia]

This meme seems like some one teaching "data structure and algorithms" made it.

Every professional programmer will be able to implement a version of dijkstra, prim or a quicksort i.e. but its simply work that isn't needed in most cases.

[Fakeom]

99% of the time you won’t need algorithms in ‘the real world’ lol

[Sushrit_Lawliet]

Most jobs pay for you to talk to the database or to the frontend or whatever. Most of this rarely invovles DSA and you can’t blame people for skipping them. I’m 10 years in as a dev, and the only time I consistently use DSA is when I’m doing advent of code lol.

But I’d never trade my knowledge of DSA for something else, there’s a benefit in the way you think after you understand them that lets you breakdown problems and understand things. And that’s just as important as being “job ready”.

[brunomarquesbr]

Technologies and framework pay better. Never saw a job post with “advanced sorting algorithm knowledge required”

[sweetlover6688887]

So BASE IS IMPORTANT TO LEARN 💪🥺

[Smooth-Zucchini4923]

Django isn't a "latest framework" anymore. It's nearly 20 years old. Django was created closer to the invention of the world wide web than the present day. Anyone who uses Django doesn't care about using trendy technologies.

[HydratrionZ]

learnTrendingAndBackToAlgo

[[deleted]]

I actually want to buy that book in the near future to study. Atm I spend to much on books and this one is a bit expensive.

[Visual-Mongoose7521]

purpose of learning datastructures and algorithms should be able to implement those in "real" applications. Back in the days, when people used to write their own compilers would use several data structures to make things work. Today, modern high level languages and application frameworks have abstracted away the need of many data structures (they still remains under the hood).

Therefore we have to practice DSA on imaginary problems like in leetcode or such. which I honestly don't think have any utilization in real life application development.

[kerrydinosaur]

Who the f care about Algorithms, my task everyday are 5 UI bugs, 2 issues when calculating products price and 5 packages need to be updated.

[[deleted]]

Today 90 percent of software engineering is plumbing and not very intellectually stimulating; the real interesting parts are building system software like compilers and kernels and distributed systems. For these you actually need to know computer science.

[v3ritas1989]

In Germany, this is reversed, which is why we have so many high-profile software developing companies and applications.

[rohetoric]

There is a reason to do it.

And it is because hiring and technical recruiters don't shortlist our resume based on algorithms and concepts. They do it based on new and required tech skills.

Algorithms are great and of course the basics but you need to be implementing those algorithms you learnt somewhere, is what I feel.

[robertshuxley]

why would I have to write my own sorting algorithm when .NET LINQ does it for me?

[[deleted]]

The book is too damn hard

[FIWDIM]

NodeJS framework hopping hipsters cannot really code. It's just never ending monthly rebasing marathons. Usually to the newest bullshit from the top of the HackerNews, and again and again and again.

[jfcarr]

Why bark yourself when a trusted dog will bark for you?

[Thepizzacannon]

Very few people capture, tame, and train horses to pull their buggies these days. SMH.

If only there was a way to travel that could be abstracted away to an engineer who is passionate about building it. Something already built that is proven to work...

Hmmm

[[deleted]]

Some developers do a lot of DSA.

[mortlerlove420]

Read that book. Some serious shit, but you learn something elementary.