3 ms·
Why even bother teaching it, then? (Semi-serious question, as you're quite right that hardly anyone ever needs to write a sort routine by hand these days.)
by iainmerrick 6y ago
Why even bother teaching it, then?
(Semi-serious question, as you're quite right that hardly anyone ever needs to write a sort routine by hand these days.)
- ogogmad 6y agoMaybe it's the things you learn along the way, such as: - Recursion and induction (mergesort, quicksort) - Lower bounds on running time (O(n log n)) - Data structures (heaps in the context of heapsort, binary search trees in the context of treesort, tries in the context of radix sort, etc.) - Difference between worst case and average case (quicksort) - The role of the hidden coefficient in O notation (insertion sort is fast for small n even though its running time is O(n^2)) Etc.