I read this and chewed on it for a while, and I think it points to a deeper problem with how we teach computer programming. While, yes, computer scientists need

I read this and chewed on it for a while, and I think it points to a deeper problem with how we teach computer programming. While, yes, computer scientists need to know about binary search vs linear search and how to iterate through collections, I propose that most programmers do not. Lots of people do programming that aren't, and shouldn't aspire to be, computer scientists (because they have other, more important, shit to do). Languages and libraries should support broad deemphasis on counting and iterating and so on. If a user wants to find a thing, they should be taught to use a method on the collection, haystack.find(needle). If they want to iterate, they should be taught to use iterators, haystack.map(measure). And so on. We, as instructors, teach people for needle in haystack and that solves the problem and they move on so they can accomplish their real goals. All of the code in this article could have been written in one iterator chain in a language that didn't promote for l in locals as a first option, and with instruction that saved such implementation details for later.