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A comment on Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calculus classes. Parent comment

Re:Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calcul... by stcredzero on Tuesday April 15, 2008 @12:09PM (#164213)
I really wish that a lot of the non computer-science people I have to work with knew at least a smattering of what it means that something is O(n^2) versus O(n log(n)). In fact, I sometimes wish that programmers who I've had to work with understood!
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Re:Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calcul... by johnm on Sunday April 20, 2008 @05:22PM (#168743)
Indeed!

I was "interviewing" with the head developer at a media startup who thought he knew his stuff and after handing him his hat on a number of things, he tried one last "zinger" question on O(). Turns out that neither he nor the head of engineering knew the difference between O(n^2) and O(n log n) but they were so confident that they did. Unbelievable.

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