> I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my sift wasn't working. Wasted like an hour on it. Turns out it was working, it was just my printing/test-harness

> I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my sift wasn't working. Wasted like an hour on it. Turns out it was working, it was just my printing/test-harness stuff that was flawed. Sure that was a useful hard-knock, but it really served as a distraction from what I was trying to do at the moment. What you think is an unnecessary distraction is in my opinion a very important experience and part of the learning process. Everything you hand-code for your own data structure be it pretty-print, test-harness, etc. are all important while learning. > Having a helper class that solves some of the basics well and sets you up for success lets you focus on the larger problems without having to constantly re-visit the basics. Once you have built the data structures bottom-up from scratch along with all the additional utilities to pretty-print it, test it, etc. you have your helpers ready already. There is no need to use someone else's helpers at that point.