An excellent point. To corroborate it, there was a challenge issued by Jon Bentley to Don Knuth to write a program that Doug McIlroy would then critique. The pr

An excellent point. To corroborate it, there was a challenge issued by Jon Bentley to Don Knuth to write a program that Doug McIlroy would then critique. The program was to parse a file and count the frequencies of words, outputting a list of the frequencies sorted highest to lowest. Knuth wrote -everything- from first principles, custom file reading, parsing, the whole nine yards. At the end he had a 10 page WEB literate programming document that solved the problem. McIlroy, in his critique, wrote a six line shell script to do the same thing tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q McIlroy pointed out that by using generalized abstractions over small tasks, file reading, parsing, sorting, etc. you can write software that can be re-used and solve the business need in a reasonable timeframe. If we did everything from first principles then nothing would get done. The merits of McIlroys argument in the context of Bentley's challenge are another matter, but I believe that his point is a good one in the general case, we are hired to build software that meets business needs, and most of the time that does -not- mean hand-crafting purpose-built data structures and algorithms. For more on the Knuth, McIlroy story: https://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/ https://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-an...