You make a good point, and it worries me somewhat. It manifests itself not just in discussion about math, but also in discussions about fast runtimes, discussions about algorithms, discussions about data structures. There is a lot of vocal self reinforcement of the ideas that speed matters little, algorithms matters little, data structures matter little.
The situation reminds me of an aphorism. I am sure there would equivalents of this story in other cultures. The story behind the aphorism goes like this:
A worldly wise frog visits his friend, a frog in a well. The frog of the well wants to know how big the world is, and proceeds to ask questions by jumping over increasing fractions of the diameter of the well, and asking "is it this big ?". About the point where the frog jumps from the sides to the center of the well, the frog proclaims now if you say the world is bigger than this you are just bullshitting me.
I see this a lot in CRUD programmers, just because they havent found a way to exploit some algorithms they think these are universally useless. Not only that, influenced by these oft repeated lines, they do not even try to find an use that would make their code more efficient. Some are more radical and propose that these topics should not be taught in CS courses. Redis is proof that CRUD can benefit from all these. Similarly, I have also seen many compute oriented programmers think CRUD is trivial. In which case I would just slide the keyboard towards them and ask them to write something that scales, is performant in terms of speed and latency, is robust and frugal with hardware resources.
The situation reminds me of an aphorism. I am sure there would equivalents of this story in other cultures. The story behind the aphorism goes like this:
A worldly wise frog visits his friend, a frog in a well. The frog of the well wants to know how big the world is, and proceeds to ask questions by jumping over increasing fractions of the diameter of the well, and asking "is it this big ?". About the point where the frog jumps from the sides to the center of the well, the frog proclaims now if you say the world is bigger than this you are just bullshitting me.
I see this a lot in CRUD programmers, just because they havent found a way to exploit some algorithms they think these are universally useless. Not only that, influenced by these oft repeated lines, they do not even try to find an use that would make their code more efficient. Some are more radical and propose that these topics should not be taught in CS courses. Redis is proof that CRUD can benefit from all these. Similarly, I have also seen many compute oriented programmers think CRUD is trivial. In which case I would just slide the keyboard towards them and ask them to write something that scales, is performant in terms of speed and latency, is robust and frugal with hardware resources.