That's funny, I must not have written any applications in the past 14 years. (Seriously though, I read one algorithms book when I was 16, and used those algorithms approximately... five times... in the past decade and a half)
Serious question: How do you know that in the applications that you have written in the past 14 years, there aren't any spots that could be considerably improved in runtime behavior and cost?
I remember being a programmer before studying formal computer science, I definitely wrote some slow and bad code that I just didn't know could be much better, and/or simpler.
This remains a serious problem on my team- Over half my team members don’t have CS degrees. They get an enormous amount done, but there is often a perf or maintainability cost.
I have no intention of swapping them out because they ultimately provide enormous value, but it’s noticeable.
Is it the algorithmic efficiency that's the problem, or the ability to scale the application?
I've seen things some people wouldn't believe. mod_perl 1.4 on Apache 2.0 handling 350,000 hps dynamic traffic on twenty archaic 1U's. Five tiers of caching, serialized objects on local disks, NFS in production. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. Who cares about inefficiency if it scales?
How do you ever know that there aren't spots that can't be considerably improved? Does it matter that much? Any inefficiency apparently wasn't bad enough to stop it being shipped.
I actually struggle more with not treating every problem like some algorithmic puzzle to be solved in one pass with O(1) extra memory and just writing stupid, slow, straight-forward code.
It's certainly good if you know how trees and linked lists are implemented, but as you point out most app devs are working on a higher level of abstraction. All of that nitty gritty implementation details are already available to application developers in convenient, well tested wrappers. You can easily go through your entire career without ever having to worry about how doubly-linked lists or B-Trees actually work.
> most app devs are working on a higher level of abstraction.
Until they don't, because for some reason the abstraction cannot be applied in a particular scenario (or actually could be, but it's not understood), or just does not scale anymore.
