Life lesson here. Anyone who claims to be great, almost certainly isn't. This is a case in point.
At the risk of offending everyone in this thread, this is written by a mediocre to reasonable programmer with no clue about his limitations, with little idea of what good programming is. He does a lot of things that he has heard about. He is used to being around bad programmers. He's used to finding problems in PHP code all day long.
Having a bad comparison set makes him think that he's better than he is.
But you cannot actually be a good programmer without having a variety of skills. Wonderful, you got your system working, do you understand it? For instance if your system has a performance problem, how do you begin to address that? How do you find problems? How do you track it? How do you fix it? How do you monitor it in the future? This stuff is important, and these are things you really can't do without having a good understanding of algorithms.
Of course understanding algorithms is not enough to be great. But it is necessary.
If you want an actual great programmer, look at Jeff Dean from Google. See http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ for a list of what he has done. He doesn't just write code. He doesn't just put systems together. He doesn't just mentor people. He doesn't just understand algorithms. He doesn't just test stuff. He doesn't just come up with infrastructure.
He does all that. And more. Excellently. (And is reportedly very modest about his abilities.)
Seriously. If "complex algorithms like sorting" is a problem for you, you are not a "great" programmer. If you can't implement a bubble sort in your sleep, you're missing something very fundamental. And if you think that sorting belongs on the same level of algorithmic complexity as compression and cryptography, you're in even more trouble.
What if I forgot how a bubble sort worked because I took algorithms so long ago? Does being able to implement it after seeing pseudo code count as being able to do it in my sleep? Am I a bad programmer because I don't remember how exactly an n^2 sort works?
At the risk of offending everyone in this thread, this is written by a mediocre to reasonable programmer with no clue about his limitations, with little idea of what good programming is. He does a lot of things that he has heard about. He is used to being around bad programmers. He's used to finding problems in PHP code all day long.
Having a bad comparison set makes him think that he's better than he is.
But you cannot actually be a good programmer without having a variety of skills. Wonderful, you got your system working, do you understand it? For instance if your system has a performance problem, how do you begin to address that? How do you find problems? How do you track it? How do you fix it? How do you monitor it in the future? This stuff is important, and these are things you really can't do without having a good understanding of algorithms.
Of course understanding algorithms is not enough to be great. But it is necessary.
If you want an actual great programmer, look at Jeff Dean from Google. See http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ for a list of what he has done. He doesn't just write code. He doesn't just put systems together. He doesn't just mentor people. He doesn't just understand algorithms. He doesn't just test stuff. He doesn't just come up with infrastructure.
He does all that. And more. Excellently. (And is reportedly very modest about his abilities.)