Back in 2001, Joel Spolsky coined "Schlemiel the Painter's algorithm" to illustrate the same class of inefficient programming techniques: https://en.wikipedia.o

Back in 2001, Joel Spolsky coined "Schlemiel the Painter's algorithm" to illustrate the same class of inefficient programming techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky#Schlemiel_the_Painter.27s_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky#Schlemiel_the_Pai... His particular example was with the standard C library function strcat where each new invocation traverses the enlarged string over and over from the beginning, in order to find the terminating NUL character and append the new part.