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Over the weekend I was grokking functional data structures and bumped into a functional pearl by Chris Okasaki from the publications of ICFP 2000. The paper is titled Breadth-First Numbering: Lessons from a Small Exercise in Algorithm Design - it indeed unfolds a beautiful algorithm and explains in detail the philosophy and thought process that went into designing it the unconventional way that he did. The part which intrigued me most was that this ingenuous (and yet simple) design did seem to him a mostly straightforward answer, while almost all other functional programmers to whom he presented the problem over the next year, did come up with a baroque solution approach, in a completely different direction than his own. Okasaki calls this the communal blind spot, that was steering programmers away from what seemed to be a very natural solution.