I thought this was going to be another one of those benchmarking articles, but it was really a great exercise in how lateral thinking can produce clean solutions.
The more I hear about the Lisp family of languages, the more I want to give them a try sometime...
Neat as this may be - optimizing a trivial algorithm is not something you'll encounter out of school.
The lesson learned is a good one though: Good design always wins. In real life, that's obvious almost immediately, yet the concept seems to elude the vast majority of programmers.
In reality the difficulty in programming is creating powerful, flexible designs. If you can look at your own code a year later and say "wow - this is good" - then you win.
There's also another thing that happens, which is to look at a big mess of twisty code and think about it, finally seeing that it should have been done as a simple algorithm. Then you get to delete a lot of code and replace it with a small bit of clear code.
There are many more ways the simple things learned in school help in the real world.
The more I hear about the Lisp family of languages, the more I want to give them a try sometime...