this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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[Request] Looking for resources on terrible algorithms, architecture, and design (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 6 months ago by nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] Corbin@programming.dev 8 points 6 months ago

There are subfields of computer science dedicated to this question. A good starting point for the theory would be Pessimal algorithms and simplexity analysis, which lays out two concepts:

  • The time & space simplexity of an algorithm indicates best-case lower bounds on resource usage, and
  • An algorithm is pessimal if no equivalent algorithm wastes more time/space/etc.

For example, common folklore is that sorting has O(n lg n) time complexity, depending on assumptions. In the paper, they give that sorting has Ω(n ** (lg n / 2)) time simplexity; any algorithm which takes more time, like bogosort, must do so through some sort of trickery like non-determinism or wasting time via do-nothing operations.