While otherwise a great article, the few CS metaphors are a huge letdown. Linked lists and RB trees are very different beasts, each appropriate for its own context. A better example of an artistic part of programming is well-placed unit tests - being able to see where a unit test will be useful in catching bugs, and where it'll sit idly passing for the rest of eternity, is an intuition of mastery.
Sorry, the metaphor was from R/B trees to flamboyantly unnecessary flip kicks - but R/B trees are quite necessary a lot of times, whereas showoff flip kicks exist purely for showing off. There's more than enough fluff used in software engineering with the sole purpose of being fancy ("enterprise software patterns" come to mind), but R/B trees are not part of it.
