[nikster]

Neat as this may be - optimizing a trivial algorithm is not something you'll encounter out of school.

The lesson learned is a good one though: Good design always wins. In real life, that's obvious almost immediately, yet the concept seems to elude the vast majority of programmers.

In reality the difficulty in programming is creating powerful, flexible designs. If you can look at your own code a year later and say "wow - this is good" - then you win.

[RiderOfGiraffes]

  > ... optimizing a trivial algorithm is not
  > something you'll encounter out of school.

Sometimes it is. For me, it happens a few times a year.

More importantly, the techniques, methods and mind set are critical daily in the code I and my employees write.

But we aren't doing web development.

[dwc]

I agree.

There's also another thing that happens, which is to look at a big mess of twisty code and think about it, finally seeing that it should have been done as a simple algorithm. Then you get to delete a lot of code and replace it with a small bit of clear code.

There are many more ways the simple things learned in school help in the real world.