Interesting. It's one of those things that I’ve always “just assumed,” without thinking about it.<p>I did a lot of raster graphics programming, in my career, and graphics work makes <i>heavy</i> use of lookup tables.<p>Yesterday, I posted a rather simple tool I wrote[0]: a server that “frontloads” a set of polygons into a database, and then uses them, at query time. It’s fairly fast (but I’m sure it could be a lot faster). I wrote it in a few hours, and got pretty good performance, right out of the starting gate.<p>Pretty basic stuff. I doubt the pattern is unique, but it’s one that I’ve used for ages. It’s where I try to do as much “upfront” work as possible, and store “half-baked” results into memory.<p>Like I said, I always “just worked that way,” and never really thought about it. There’s been a lot of “rule of thumb” stuff in my work. Didn’t have an MIT professor to teach it, but it’s sort of gratifying to see that it wasn’t just “old wives” stuff.<p>There’s probably a ton of stuff that we do, every day, that we don’t think about. Some of it almost certainly originated from really smart folks like him, finding the best way (like the “winding number” algorithm, in that server[1]), and some of it also probably comes from “grug-brained programmers,” simply doing what makes sense.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046227">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046227</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_TZ_Lookup/blob/e247f2f97fb83e5392d31f81c321814baa26dc1b/src/Sources/LGV_TZ_Lookup_Query.class.php#L101">https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_TZ_Lookup/blob/e247f...</a>