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This is just the kind of thing you file away in the back of your head as "huh, interesting", that may or may not have a practical application down the line. But occasionally the pay off for having a different way of thinking about a problem can be really big.

For example, Joel Spolsky argued a long time ago that Google was able to solve some problems faster than Microsoft because their programmers understood functional programming:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

Will this article have a similar payoff for someone someday? Hard to say, but it was probably not clear to the CS students learning map and reduce it would lead to an elegant solution to how to run computations across a massive computing infrastructure someday, either.




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