[fayyazkl]

Depending upon what sort of industry and scale you write code for, very often, it is a HUGE part.

I accept the point that over optimizing is the root of all evil and the rest of the philosophy along those lines. But knowing algorithms and data structures inside out, because where and when you have to choose what - i doubt one can be called a programmer without all that.

And i would say again, i am yet to find some body renowned, who has made their mark as a programmer, and doesn't regard all of this stuff high enough.

Having said all that, if you work in a high level language and develop client facing / application layer desktop/web related stuff - and not involving too much scaling, you won't need these things most of the times. But if not, you can't live with out these.

Lastly, since college and probably since learning to program, the best of the breed usually were the guys who went on to acm and top coder kinda stuff. It is true that building products is not synonymous, but it definitely plays an undeniable part albeit i must agree that it is slightly over valued, nothing else.

[mattmanser]

High level language? I haven't heard that kind of condescension in years. Whatever you're working on isn't as hard as you think it is. Most experienced programmers could probably do it as well as you in a couple of months.

And who is renowned in this industry? Game programmers. Not Sass, enterprise or consumer web programmers, who make up the vast majority of working programmers. No, one of the tiny subsets of programmers who do need algos.

You're stuck in your own bubble thinking it's bigger than it is (and seemingly thinking it's "proper" programming). So you're wrong because your premise is flawed. 95% of programmers do "high level language and develop client facing / application layer desktop/web related stuff". Simply open a job website and search for "developer". Add them up by SASS/Enterprise/Consumer Web and then everything else. The first category will be much bigger, 20-30 times bigger.

[fayyazkl]

I never tried stating it was hard, or making it look like it is main stream. I just said that depending upon the domain you work in, Algorithms and data structures might be more important and you might encounter them more often then in web or desktop, than an average programmer does.

So the whole line of reasoning is irrational to me. Never tried saying systems programming is more main stream then web or desktop or enterprise.

Talking about renowned, Yes people who have written kernels, operating systems, network stacks / protocols - there is huge list of renowned ones. Do you want me to spell the names out starting with Torvalds or Stallman?