Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

Re:Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great? by isp on Thursday July 06, 2017 @06:57AM (#14709423)

Good correction, but a small second nit.

> sometimes they're just plain faster

Not faster for sufficiently large N (by definition).

But your general point is correct.

I've best seen this expressed in Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming [0], Rule 3:

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy.

[0] http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html

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Re:Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great? by BeetleB on Thursday July 06, 2017 @10:43AM (#14710762)

>Not faster for sufficiently large N (by definition).

True, but supposedly researchers keep publishing algorithms with lower complexity that will be faster only if N is, like 10^30 or so.

Or so Sedgwick keeps telling us.

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