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Re:Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering by bluGill on Friday January 14, 2022 @09:00AM (#29934459)
The meaningful question for most DSA problems "does my standard library already have an an algorithm for this?", if no the proper follow up is "okay, I need to head to my library for a few hours to research if there is a known answer that I can copy - will I be given time to propose the addition of the algorithm to my languages standard library so nobody else needs to do this again?" I don't want someone write an algorithm in a couple hours, I want someone to write the one implementation that is correct.

Now sometimes there are compromises in algorithms (I can think of 3 different nlogn sorting algorithms and I think I've forgotten a dozen more) and so the company has a propitiatory library that has an implementation with different compromises. They should have benchmarks and pros and cons written down (ad ideally be open source) so that anytime someone asks about the algorithm they can point out why they have their own and possibly contribute it to the standard library if everyone agrees to a different compromise.

These days that vast majority of the simple algorithms have already been written. I might need someone to design a more complex algorithm, but they either takes months of thought, or are just a sequence of simple algorithms.

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