> how much will that sloppiness cost the employer/customer in hardware and the maintainer and users in time? Next to nothing in almost every case. In fact tha

> how much will that sloppiness cost the employer/customer in hardware and the maintainer and users in time? Next to nothing in almost every case. In fact that hash table is probably overkill most of the time. Unless you're dealing with keys that have a costly comparison, a large number of key value pairs, or a large number of lookups (for some context-specific value of "large") the most naive and "inelegant" of solutions you could imagine, an unsorted array of key value pairs, is sufficient most of the time. So in fact what you call a "sloppy" solution is probably, and quite by accident, far more powerful an algorithm than the problem truly calls for. Understanding complexity analysis is useful when the domain has performance demands or constraints that make it necessary. "Lowly" web dev is almost never one of those domains.