Hey folks! I think this request is right up this comm’s alley. I’m sure that we all know bogo sort but, what other terrible/terribly inefficient algorithms, software architecture, or design choices have you been horrified/amused by?
I, sadly, lost a great page of competing terrible sorting algorithms, but I’ll lead with JDSL as a terrible (and terribly inefficient) software architecture and design. The TL;DR is that a fresh CS guy got an internship at a company that based its software offering around a custom, DSL based on JSON that used a svn repo to store all functions in different commits. The poor intern had a bad time due to attempting to add comments to the code, resulting in customer data loss.
Technically, sleep sort is O(n), so faster than the theoretical optimal sorting algorithm O(n.log n) … not so bad ;)
Sleep sort is kind of like count sort but with added overhead. Both have a complexity of O(n+m) with n being the length and m the value of the max element.
The optimum of O(n * log n) is based on the assumption that the only information about the values is obtained by comparison. If you operate on integer keys I would recommend radix sort. It has a complexity of O(n * w) where w is the length (read logarithm) of the key.