The joy of unnecessary optimizations

The overwhelming majority of all professional programming is about solving a large number of simple problems. The intellectually challenging problems are rare and in many situations solving a problem with a complicated but efficient solution is hard to justify. It is much cheaper to buy a faster computer with more memory to run your program than it is to write a smarter program that uses less resources.

However, I really enjoy the challenge of writing efficient and elegant code that solve a particular problem, so sometimes when I get a bit of free time and want to do something relaxing I spend time writing solutions to small programming puzzles that I run across in my day job working for Voxbiblia.

The next post contains the solution to one such puzzle and the solution I just wrote. It might be interesting to some.

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