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I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that many developers, for reasons which are usually out of their control, simply do not have the mathematical backg
by crispyambulance 6y ago
I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that many developers, for reasons which are usually out of their control, simply do not have the mathematical background to that makes notions of O of n intuitive or even understandable.
Even if they went to a good university, they might have sleep-walked through their calc/analysis courses and then encountered this stuff later in upper level CS, and learned by rote just enough to pass the class.
It's because of a lack of focus on fundamentals in undergrad education.
- jimmaswell 6y agoThe concepts are intuitive without ever having heard of Big O. The notation can help compare algorithms but it's obvious enough cutting the data in half every step is more performant than looping over them all every time, super deep nested loops should be avoided if possible, etc.
- pmiller2 6y ago> ...many developers... simply do not have the mathematical background... for reasons which are usually out of their control... > ...sleep-walked through their calc/analysis courses... I think you both identified the problem and shot down your argument in one breath here. Self taught developers can probably be forgiven for not knowing what big O is, right up until the point where someone asks them about it, and they say "what's big O?" After that, nothing prevents anybody from cracking a book or going on the internet to figure it out.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago100% agree. The concept of Big O is actually pretty simple, so I would expect someone to be able to pick up the basic given a little bit of research.