Nice to see you on HN, John! I had previously learned these as map and reduce/inject (thank you, ruby). It's only this past few months when I took an algorith

Nice to see you on HN, John! I had previously learned these as map and reduce/inject (thank you, ruby). It's only this past few months when I took an algorithms course on Coursera that I realized how much of a pain it was to do some of this stuff in other langauges (like Java). To me it was just natural to write functions that operated on an array of "stuff", rather than arrays of ints or strings, etc... The course literally had us building identical functions for handling different data types and then finally solving the problem via generics and the use of an ugly typecast.