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OT: I wish I could relocate a blog post (on Microsoft’s site, I think) about a very a naive and “obviously wrong” sorting algorithm that a dev identified in their (Excel?) codebase. Turns out the code was naive because the vast majority of their users were sorting very small sets of data and the implementation actually performed much better in those circumstances.

Maybe it's this one? https://ericlippert.com/2020/03/27/new-grad-vs-senior-dev/

Funnily enough, if you're sorting small amounts of stuff it does not matter what algorithm you use. If fact your O(n log n) sorts are probably a lot slower on less than some millions of elements.

> I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort

Remember reading Bentley's Programming Pearls and fairly sure that's what he starts Sorting section with a short implementation of