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Neat writeup, if missing the mathematical portion that speeds it up.

One callout if folks think about implementing something similar. Euclidean distance on a sphere has unintended consequences. Great circle distance would be more appropriate.

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It's not even a correctly normalized Euclidean distance.

You're correct, this is just a synthetic value used to rank the distances.

It would be marginally slower to take the square root when all you need is rank

That is correct, but - as pointed in the article - we work on floor plans, which are flat, so I wanted to simplify this a bit to not create too much issues to solve in one article. That said, it was probably an oversimplification, since actual geographic data (and a map view) was used, point taken.

No worries whatsoever. It wasn't a critique of the general idea, simply to keep distance metrics in mind relative to scale.

Working on the a floor plan or proof of concept? Euclidean metric absolutely works.

Working on Mercator projections or legal type stuff? eh....

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