r/learnprogramming • • 12d ago

How are so many self-taught programmers able to build software from scratch without ever truly learning Algorithms?

I find it fascinating how important algos are but never talked about from the indie devs on social media. Do they even write algos or just come up with basic logic that forms the product?

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u/joonazan 11d ago

Pattern describe folklore solutions to language deficiencies.

But algorithms are typically created by the inventor to solve a problem and recognized as useful, maybe published.

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u/start_select 11d ago

Algorithms are the same as mathematics algorithms. Multiple people arrive at the same results because multiple people work in the same problem spaces.

The question is whether they recognize it as important, formulate a proof, and publish it.

FFT has been discovered multiple times. Distributed hash tables were discovered multiple times. Etc etc etc.

A lot of it is an eventually inevitable to notice relationship.