Well, people will just write Mozilla... because that's what they know, and a standard human doesn't want to learn. That's why they usually use FF for Firefox, although it's one word, and the official abbreviation is Fx.
Promoting this change will cost millions.
I hope this is not the same case, but when I was working on lots of places, and there was a manager who didn't have any results, he usually proposed things like this one. Useless, not needed, confusing clients, and extremely expensive. Then the upper management, who usually was not very technical, and couldn't understand our changelogs, was very happy with this change. Maybe because this was the only thing they could fully understand. This kind of change usually was something like: changing the name of the main product, the name of the company, or changing the official colors (which included a new logo, new website, lots of new printed materials). Did I say that this manager was promoted?
For the last 15 years I was always slow, bad, and pessimistic. In fact I was fast, good, and realistic. However in the companies I was working at, the promoted guys were always writing buggy code, and really didn't understand what was going on. They even didn't want to understand that. They were promoted, and not me. Why? Because the speed was what there managers were promoted for. So they wanted to surround themselves with similar stupid-but-fast programmers. This way they all were promoted, got bonuses, and they were one brainless corporation family. I wanted to make some good work, and understand why something works this, or other way.
And one day I gave up. It was hard to hear all the time something like "you are too pessimistic, why you always say that we cannot build the Tardis in a month?", or "You are too slow, you see that guy in the corner? He is ten times faster then the whole team (and he is happy working in an open space). And now the whole team will be fixing the thousands of failing tests (caused by this guy) for the next six months. Because if they will be red, I won't get the yearly bonus.". The latter is real.
So I don't care anymore. My side projects are opposite. So I build them slowly. Very slowly. And I learn all the things around them.
What is O(n log n)? Time complexity? What about memory requirement? Last month I decreased memory requirement from 16GB to 100MB in one implementation of a "stable&fast" algorithm.
Really, using a function just because it's O(n log n) without understanding its characteristic is like a blind surgeon randomly amputating limbs because maybe it will help.
But that's fine for me, I have more work then, fixing software bugs made by incompetent* programmers is quite nice.
*incompetent - those who think they know something and are not willing to learn anything new
And then worst case? Best case? Average case? Which applies to random input? Nearly-sorted input? What's the overhead for a "short sort", can/should I use this to sort small sequences in a tight-ish loop or is it only for large sequences?
I was under the illusion that Big-O was always asymptotic complexity (ie worst case) and that other notations (little-o, big-omega, big-thetha etc) were used for best/average/etc case. Perhaps I'm wrong, however.
Which applies to random input? Nearly-sorted input? What's the overhead for a "short sort", can/should I use this to sort small sequences in a tight-ish loop or is it only for large sequences?
Indeed. The details matter.
My favourite example is how a naive linear search can perform better than a non-linear search with a better (in O() terms) algorithm if, for example, the linear search can do most of its work in cache (eg small input sizes or otherwise regular access patterns (predictable for prefetch)).
> I was under the illusion that Big-O was always asymptotic complexity (ie worst case) and that other notations (little-o, big-omega, big-thetha etc) were used for best/average/etc case. Perhaps I'm wrong, however.
No, asymptotic notation only refers to the behaviour of the function (or algorithm) as you take the limit N->inf, e.g. changes to the size of the input. But the nature of the input often changes the behavior as well.
You can have Big-O of worst case and Big-O of average case. "Asymptotic complexity" itself does not imply worst case; the assumptions you make to construct the function itself determine worst case or average case.
Nobody mentioned quicksort. You're assuming quicksort, which is what the issue is. Many languages don't actually use quicksort, fyi. The practical performance considerations of just quicksort itself also change depending on how you've implemented the small details - are you moving memory around, or just changing pointers? Huge difference in the real world, no difference in the algorithm.
I oversimplified my response and it lost the point I was making. You are certainly correct that many languages don't use quicksort. My bad.
I was responding to a comment that I felt was needlessly dismissive. The default sort algorithm of any major language's standard library is usually not worth trying to beat, and calling someone "incompetent" for not reinventing the wheel each time they encounter data that needs to be sorted is absurd. Note: I said "usually", not "never". A competent programmer doesn't fix problems that don't exist, and you would absolutely have to profile code before convincing me that the choice of sorting algorithm was the source of a performance problem.
As far as the details go... In only a few languages (e.g. C) might you really even consider moving memory around rather than pointers. The semantics of standard library sort in Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Javascript... is sorting an array of primitives by value or objects by reference.
His argument should rather be written like "This is America, you are not allowed even to write your last name normally" - then it sounds stupid/irrational/funny enough.
which seems to be the case in switzerland: If you want to apply for swiss citizenship, your name needs to be compatible with ISO-8859-15 because the central registry does not support unicode: https://www.dasmagazin.ch/2016/09/02/ic-bin-kein-schweizer/ (sorry, german only, which seems oddly apt)
Yea, use Python2, don't use Unicode, but please add information to a registration form like:
"due to our programmers' limitations please don't enter your first name or last name as your write it, use only ASCII characters, otherwise our servers may blow up".
PS) This is what I had to work on last year. Happy US programmers who know nothing except English. And suddenly the software blew up, just because a client wanted to enter his name.
I was working in an open space for a couple of years. The phones were ringing happily, including the official corporate ones, which were standing on each desk. People were talking all the time. Talking, walking, looking at my screen, of course with lots of comments to my code. 70 people in the floor.
We had all the funny things for the group integration all the time. All the things except for thinking.
Yes, I was sitting all the time with my headphones, shouting maximally to my ears. Until one of those people making noise told me that it is not team friendly to have so loud phones, as he hears the music, and cannot concentrate.
Of course the management had their separate offices, with walls, and doors. They didn't see any problem.
For the last 6 years I've been working remotely from home. Well, what a change. In 4 hours I could do more than for a week in the open space.
Same story here. At my previous job when they rolled out the open office a bunch of us complained and the boss explained how he'd be giving up his office to work out on the floor with us. Not even joking, less than an hour after he moved his stuff out he moved it back into his office saying "it's too distracting, I can't get anything done out here".
Now working from home I make more progress per day then I did on a weekly basis there.
I agree with all of this. I worked in open offices and Agile "team rooms" for many years, and I've been working from home for the last few. There's definitely a huge increase in the amount of quality code I'm able to crank out working from home.
However, I do think some intangibles are lost. They're hard, maybe impossible, to quantify. Instead, I'll just link to a post from PG that's a transcription of a speech by Richard Hamming. http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html And to save you a click, this is the paragraph that stuck with me:
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."
Obviously there are ways to mitigate that, e.g., involvement in the developer community or establishing habits to replace "water cooler" chatter, but they take deliberate effort.
Similar here - open door mezzanine office with a 12 phone, 2 radio recruiting agency down and opposite. Three month review came up with "You're not synergising with the team sitting there with headphones on all the time". Walked out the next day.
Quite funny. My blog page (with text only) has score 4.06. Converting it to image is stupid. Btw. I've been working with a Korean company on a couple of Korean websites. What they provided was ONLY IMAGES. All the texts were images, new content was in images, all the changes were just image changes. It was a nightmare.
Once had a customer who did the same. His reason at the time was that his customers see boxes otherwise. This was one of my first projects and I was still in school then. Didn't know anything about unicode, plus unicode was not that popular then.
I guess, may be your customer has the same problem.
Yea, I know, shouting is not the best thing, but this is a really good news.