> Wouldn't the easy problems have been solved as they are by definition, easy?
No, not at all. “Easy” does not mean “obvious”. I once replaced a call to scp with a call to rsync in a script I didn’t originally write. The result was that an operation which used to take more than an hour and was thus run occasionally now took seconds and was executed every time. Both speed and reliability were increased with one simple and easy line change.
While the bottleneck had been recognised earlier, the original authors had learned to live with it. They weren’t aware of how it could have been improved so drastically with so little effort. That’s another thing: easy is relative.
Either way, you’re conflating easy (the opposite of difficult) with simple (the opposite of complex, which is the word used by the person you’re replying to). They are not the same thing. Easy mathematical formulas can make complex fractal shapes and complex programs can do simple things.
Similarly I sped up a python script by 3 orders of magnitude by running a linter on it; the script intended to cache a value for reuse, but neglected to actually reuse the value, resulting in an unused-variable warning in the linter.
No, not at all. “Easy” does not mean “obvious”. I once replaced a call to scp with a call to rsync in a script I didn’t originally write. The result was that an operation which used to take more than an hour and was thus run occasionally now took seconds and was executed every time. Both speed and reliability were increased with one simple and easy line change.
While the bottleneck had been recognised earlier, the original authors had learned to live with it. They weren’t aware of how it could have been improved so drastically with so little effort. That’s another thing: easy is relative.
Either way, you’re conflating easy (the opposite of difficult) with simple (the opposite of complex, which is the word used by the person you’re replying to). They are not the same thing. Easy mathematical formulas can make complex fractal shapes and complex programs can do simple things.