[earenndil]

> I appreciate Masters of the Universe types like Bloch and Lea contributing wickedly-efficient code, but somehow it's always mere mortals who end up mopping things up after the fact

I think this is the wrong way to look at the problem. Progress is always iterative. If a given person happens to make a bigger iteration, then people call them 'masters of the universe', but that iteration isn't inherently different from the normal, smaller kind of iteration. And - consider: if every line of code has a chance of being buggy, then a bigger change is likelier to be more buggy. I say more buggy, rather than have more bugs, because bugginess is rarely disconnected; the whole conception is likely to be more flawed the newer it is. If we were to only accept small contributions then, somewhere along the way from here to the limit, we would arrive at timsort. And all the flaws of timsort wouldn't be gone, they would just be amortized into smaller chunks along the way from here to there. Which may be preferable, but that's something you have to consider; it's not so cut-and-dry as 'if we only make change conservatively, then we avoid catastrophic failure'.

All this not to mention that there are people who are 'masters of the universe' at fixing bugs.

[mavelikara]

> I think this is the wrong way to look at the problem. Progress is always iterative. If a given person happens to make a bigger iteration, then people call them 'masters of the universe', but that iteration isn't inherently different from the normal, smaller kind of iteration.

+1. Bloch himself made the iteration over work by Arthur van Hoff and others at Sun before him.