[eaa]

One can argue endlessly about necessity of knowing theory, but instead I would describe a funny situation I have seen once.

There was a piece of code that had to receive some items asynchronously one by one while they were being downloaded. Also, duplicates had to be found by some key and merged together. So, first a dumb and straightforward implementation was done using a vector and linear search. After some time management decided to stress test it with some extreme amount of items. And instead of fraction of second or seconds it was taking minutes which was unacceptable. A colleague of mine was assigned the task to fix this. What has he done, what do you think? He spawned another thread for search of duplicates. On a single core hardware. It didn't help. So he asked our team leader for help. What did he do? He increased a share of CPU time for that thread (it was a RTOS). That also didn't help. I was watching at all this with interest and suspicion and remembered at some moment that there is an algorithm for binary search which is much faster than linear search. So I removed all the code for additional thread and instead made vector to be always sorted and applied binary search. Download time changed from minutes to 10 seconds.

This way I learned about importance of algorithms (which for some strange reason haven't been taught in my university). But my colleague didn't learn anything, because he still thinks that theory of algorithms is for that kind of people that take part in programming contests and not for real programmers who "get sh*t done."

Let's face it: even programming is full of people with attitude of anti-intellectualism. Although this whole industry wouldn't be born with such attitude.