alt Hacker News> Saying it's overrated is like saying calculus is overrated because most people don't need to use it every day.
You should stop thinking by analogy.
The article was showing the difference between mathematicians and engineers. For the mathematicians that created Computation Science, the only interesting solutions are complete solutions to general questions, whereas for engineers it's perfectly acceptable to eliminate some corner cases, thereby solving a reduced and simplified version of the general problem.
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> The article was showing the difference between mathematicians and engineers.
No. Many engineers AND mathematicians worked for a long time to get us to a stage where Amazon can solve a billion SMT problems a day. To contribute, all of them had to understand the theory this article calls overrated.
You have clearly not encountered theoretical computer scientists. They love to create all kinds of complexity classes and theorems to capture things like heuristics and approximation algorithms and other things which work in practice but not theory.
In fact that’s a big research thrust right now, to understand why many real-world SAT instances are solvable quickly while others are not, and where the threshold between them lies
> For the mathematicians that created Computation Science, the only interesting solutions are complete solutions to general questions
Except that's not really true, which is the whole point of the finer computational classes. If many instances are far from the worst case, that tells you something interesting about the class, which is why we have things like parameterised complexity. People who think that the theory is only interested in the general case of the broad classes you learn as an undergrad are just not sufficiently familiar with the theory.