This is how I began my career. I fell into programming by way of physics, and for things like sorting I always knew better than to try to roll my own sorting al

This is how I began my career. I fell into programming by way of physics, and for things like sorting I always knew better than to try to roll my own sorting algorithm. Every language has well tested, finely tuned libraries for that! But my job (writing simulation and numerical optimization code) made me program all day every day, so I figured I could program. Boy was I surprised when I started interviewing for my second job and got asked to write code to sort a list. My first thought was "Why would you ever do that yourself! Of course I've never thought about that!" Many years later, I've filled in most of the gaps in my CS fundamentals, and I can't help but wonder if a lot of the programmers we're talking about came into it like I did.