Re:Challenging projects every programmer should try
by kragen on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @08:23AM
(#38771552)
if your input data doesn't scale then either
① you're writing a real-time control program such as a motor controller and you care about not just the asymptotic complexity of your algorithms but their worst-case execution time, in microseconds; or
② you should just do the computation by hand with pencil and paper instead of writing and debugging a program to do it for you
at the point that the input data becomes too big for ② to be an appealing option, n is at least 100, which means you probably care a lot about whether your program is O(n) or O(n⁴), at least if you wrote it in something slow like python
maybe the time to start worrying about it is after you start the program debugged and running for the first time
① you're writing a real-time control program such as a motor controller and you care about not just the asymptotic complexity of your algorithms but their worst-case execution time, in microseconds; or
② you should just do the computation by hand with pencil and paper instead of writing and debugging a program to do it for you
at the point that the input data becomes too big for ② to be an appealing option, n is at least 100, which means you probably care a lot about whether your program is O(n) or O(n⁴), at least if you wrote it in something slow like python
maybe the time to start worrying about it is after you start the program debugged and running for the first time