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Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

It’s good to understand what the “Big O” for your algorithm is, but, yes, people who obsess over it are annoying. If I know I’m processing 100 items very rarely,[a] does it matter if my quick and dirty sorting (no pun intended) algorithm is bubble or quick sort? They both complete in a fraction of a second, and the user (generally) isn’t going to notice a difference between a single frame update delta or two.

[a] Key words are 100 items very rarely: if you’re sorting many times a second (for whatever reason) or (relatively) large datasets, using a quicker sorting algorithm than bubble or insertion would make sense.

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I had basically this exact discussion with a coworker. I said something offhand that I rarely consider big O, beyond avoiding obviously inefficient patterns; they replied they basically are always considering big O. Personally, that strikes me as premature optimization. My priorities are generally:

1. Solve the problem.

2. Ensure correctness of that solution

3. The code is easy to reason about

4. The app is robust

5. "good enough" performance

6. Performance tuning

Which is of course the "correct answer", and of course in practice these all blend together I will emphasize any number of those at a given time (who doesn't love spending an occasional afternoon just chasing pointless benchmarks?). But I never come at it from a "big O mindset" even when that's what I'm doing in practice, I just call it "common sense" and heuristics: don't put slow things in tight loops, memoize when you can, and leverage concurrency.

In my line of work (CV), moving a slow blocking operation from serial to async will get you easy, bigger wins 90% of the time, vs seeking out something in polytime and refactoring to nlogn.

I once worked on an application where we (in one common situation) had to sort an array that was always <= 5 elements and in 90+% of cases was already completely (or mostly) sorted. I got a lot of heat from co-workers when I used bubble sort for that task, since "bubble sort is terribly inefficient" (and it is for large random datasets). But, given the actual data in question, no-one could actually make any other sort perform faster.

Know your data.

My rule is that the only sort I will ever write by hand is a bubble sort. It's basically impossible to write incorrectly. If and when that breaks performance, then I will bring in an external sorting library and figure out what works the best for the data.

It's the equivalent philosophy to always buying the cheapest tool you can the first time around. When you break that tool, then you go out and buy the expensive one.

The cheapest tool you can find is surely the sort in your programming language's standard library. Writing your own sort seems crazy to me.

What can I say. Sometimes you're not working with the blessed standard data structures for which those algorithms are typically written.

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