I actually agree with this remark: "In the talk.origins newsgroup someone made an offhand remark that they didn't see how anybody, no matter how klutzy their pr

I actually agree with this remark: "In the talk.origins newsgroup someone made an offhand remark that they didn't see how anybody, no matter how klutzy their programming, could write an O(n^3) sort." The examples were all constructed by smart people who are deliberately trying to invent slow algorithms. I don't think that a klutzy programmer would stumble upon any of them by chance. The slowest sorting algorithm that I've seen in production was something like this: def sort(l): s = [] while len(l) > 0: m = max(l) s.append(m) l.remove(m) s.reverse() return s I looked like a hero when I reduced the main page load time for our biggest customer by 90% in one afternoon :-)