Revisiting "Tricky When You Least Expect It"

Since writing Tricky When You Least Expect It in June 2010, I've gotten a number of responses offering better solutions to the angle_diff problem. The final version I presented in the original article was this:
angle_diff(Begin, End) -> D = End - Begin, DA = abs(D), case {DA > 180, D > 0} of {true, true} -> DA - 360; {true, _} -> 360 - DA; _ -> D end.
But, maybe surprisingly, this function can be written in two lines:
angle_diff(Begin, End) -> (End - Begin + 540) rem 360 - 180.
The key is to shift the difference into the range -180 to 180 before the modulo operation. The "- 180" at the end adjusts it back. One quirk of Erlang is that the modulo operator (rem) gives a negative result if the first value is negative. That's easily fixed by adding 360 to the difference (180 + 360 = 540) to ensure that it's always positive. (Remember that adding 360 to an angle gives the same angle.)

So how did I miss this simpler solution? I got off track by by thinking I needed an absolute value, and things went downhill from there. I'd like to think if I could rewind and re-attempt the problem from scratch, then I'd see the error of my ways, but I suspect I'd miss it the second time, too. And that's what I was getting at when I wrote "Tricky When You Least Expect It": that you never know when it will take some real thought to solve a seemingly simple problem.

(Thanks to Samuel Tardieu, Benjamin Newman, and Greg Rosenblatt, who all sent almost identical solutions.)