[tloup]

But if you can grind these what's the point then? All I'm doing at work is building glorified crud apps. I'm sure it's what many, many software engineers are doing. Not all, but many. My understanding of e.g. Django is much more important to my daily work than being able to come up with the fastest way to find a maximum value in an array.

[globular-toast]

Nobody said anything about the fastest way to find a maximum value in an array. The comment you were replying to was just about finding a maximum value in an array. Idiomatic usage would presumably be a bonus but anything not ridiculously inefficient would be fine. This is absolutely something that someone building a CRUD app should know how to do without StackOverflow.