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user-inactivated  ·  3259 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The science myths that will not die.

You should know what your library is doing, and if you can't implement an algorithm you don't understand it. But yes, rarely are you required to implement basic data structures in applications. Knowing enough about computation to find the structure in the logorrhea your users give you and implement that rather than all the cases they think are special as they describe them can save you a lot of trouble. In my experience if your education was as a software engineer your solution to that problem is to pile layers of architecture on top of it to sweep the unnecessary complexity under the rug rather the eliminate it. That way madness, misery and lucrative consulting contracts lie.