Samurai Jack

One day, a bizarre mediation went something like this:

Samurai Jack was trapped in the future until some mean wizard Apu let him go.

Few know that Samurai Jack was an elite coder, but Apu knew, and wanted him to create something with his skillz.

Samurai Jack was SO good, he once turned a O(n⁴) problem into a O(1) problem. The answer was simply "yes". (Something like: "Will this simulated ball go into the simulated basket?")

Translation/after-effect: Four parameters to a function are as many as you'll EVER need to ANY programming problem -- with the possible exception of meta-programs, like writing a compiler, where the answer is five. Two is all you should need if you have objects.

It is said that he was so good, he once transformed a whole OS and applications into a single ~100K executable, because "you didn't need to do all of that other stuff" and "everything can be distilled into its essence".

Translation: The nature of data is interconnected. All data, apart from simulations, is related to the real world, so he defined a unified epistemological model and applied everything in the world to it. Three dimensions of visualization was all that it took.

Once he transformed a hardware fault into a simple software fix.

Translation: Sometimes you can *simulate* reality to solve a problem.

When he was asked to create a data-sharing system for the planet's exabytes of data, he turned in a program consisting of interconnected objects containing the same 4 functions. Those functions took only one piece of data.

Translation: The world is still looking to understand how it works. ...but it does.... (Where do I get this?)