[Request] Looking for resources on terrible algorithms, architecture, and design
Hey folks! I think this request is right up this comm's alley. I'm sure that we all know bogo sort but, what other terrible/terribly inefficient algorithms, software architecture, or design choices have you been horrified/amused by?
I, sadly, lost a great page of competing terrible sorting algorithms, but I'll lead with JDSL as a terrible (and terribly inefficient) software architecture and design. The TL;DR is that a fresh CS guy got an internship at a company that based its software offering around a custom, DSL based on JSON that used a svn repo to store all functions in different commits. The poor intern had a bad time due to attempting to add comments to the code, resulting in customer data loss.
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sleep sort
Technically, sleep sort is O(n), so faster than the theoretical optimal sorting algorithm O(n.log n) ... not so bad ;)
Sleep sort is kind of like count sort but with added overhead. Both have a complexity of O(n+m) with n being the length and m the value of the max element.
The optimum of O(n * log n) is based on the assumption that the only information about the values is obtained by comparison. If you operate on integer keys I would recommend radix sort. It has a complexity of O(n * w) where w is the length (read logarithm) of the key.