> You probably won't see someone writing asm but creating crazy O^2 algorithms I watched a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup that he gave to undergraduate CS majors

> You probably won't see someone writing asm but creating crazy O^2 algorithms I watched a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup that he gave to undergraduate CS majors at Texas A&M where he coded a solution to a problem using linear scans and then a "better" solution using better algorithms with better big O performance. Then he did something interesting. He did a test on a tiny data set to demonstrate that the solution with linear scans was faster, and he asked the audience to guess at what data size the more efficient algorithms would start to beat the linear scan. After the audience members threw out a wide range of guesses he confessed that he didn't know. He had tried to test it that afternoon, but the linear scans outperformed the "better" algorithms on any data set that he could allocate memory for on his laptop. IIRC he finished by telling them that professionals often do performance optimization the opposite of how the books present it. Using an algorithm with optimal big-O scaling isn't the optimized solution. It's the safe answer that you start with if you aren't bothering to optimize. When you need better performance, you evaluate your algorithms using real data and real machines and qualify your evaluations based on the characteristics (size, etc.) of the data.