Hacker News Reader

> I hate the term “dynamic programming”. It sounds so cool, but then you find out that all it means is “I memoized the results in a table”. Ho hum.

The Wikipedia section on the history of the term[1] is quite amusing. Basically, the guy who invented the idea picked the name that was most likely to get his research grant applications approved.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

View on HN

Really Bellman did nothing new when he used the word programming as that had already been used in the phrase "linear programming" for one or two decades. Mathematical programming was the optimization of military programs.

If you majored in CS at university, you probably suffered through a lot of it. It sinks in after awhile and is rather useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com