My talk at the PuPPy March 2024 talk night, and PyCascades 2024.
We discuss the pleasure of problem solving by dissolution.
Alexander Grothendieck gave the analogy of a rising sea as a metaphor for his approach to problem solving. While it is sometimes possible to solve a problem through sheer force, to Grothendieck, more satisfying and fruitful is a slow process that builds careful theory, where each step is as simple and trivial as possible, until the problem simply dissipates. We discuss what this strategy looks like in the context of programming, giving an example from Advent of Code.