Data structures and algorithms

[fanf]

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." - Linus Torvalds

"If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming." - Rob Pike

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." - Fred Brooks

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Sadly, I feel those admirable principles are becoming gradually less applicable.

While that's the situation if a single competent computer scientist has been near the code and data, these days it's all too common to find one programmer doing an O(n) search on data another has given them in lexical order. Or, worse, to do an O(log n) search on unsorted data where the test corpus just happened to be sorted because of its provenance.

Revealing the data structure and making explicit the invariants which apply goes a lot further towards making the algorithm obvious.

But then there are a great many people who touch code and data these days who simply don't think at all in terms of DSA. I suppose that just means that when you see the data isn't structured you can tell there's no algorithm to speak of, but still…

[fanf]

I think this is (to some extent) because of the abundance of computing power we have now, c.f. Pike's rules 2 and 3 3 and 4. But I will sympathize by noting that Ken Thompson said "When in doubt, use brute force" but he didn't say "... and ignorance".

Some bright spots include this presentation about the performance pitfalls of object-oriented programming and everything on the the mechanical sympathy list (which is where I came to collect these quotes).