category: math
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Set-Based Operations: They're Not Just For Databases
What do you think of when you hear the term set-based operations? I have always thought of that as a database concept. Set-based operations address or operate on multiple data elements, seemingly in parallel, as opposed to iterating through and executing operations one by one. I was introduced to this concept in the context of SQL in relational databases, and it was a struggle at first. My brain was more naturally predisposed to think in terms of iterating over a list, doing one thing at a time.
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Problems Already Solved
Somewhere I recently heard someone say something like, “Programming is easy; all the interesting problems have already been solved by mathematics.” I was a bit taken aback by this at first, but it got me thinking about what problems I am solving when I write code. When I’m programming, am I more often addressing a real-world problem, or some kind of software problem? How much of my code is spent on converting, transforming, serializing, deserializing, logging, formatting, validating, and error handling? Usually too much to be very interesting. It’s all plumbing, but what I really want is water.
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