Donald E. Knuth in Python, cont'd
Mark Lawrence
breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Apr 11 19:03:12 EDT 2012
On 11/04/2012 22:03, Dan Sommers wrote:
> These days, every job interview includes (or should include!)
> questions regarding which structures and which algorithms are
> better (or worse) for which circumstances, not to mention
> questions about algorithm complexity and big-O-notation. I find
> that people who *understand* the built-ins can *use* them much
> more effectively than people who don't.
>
> And that's the difference between "serious programmers" and "most
> programmers."
>
> Dan
Reminds me of a design review at which the database manager stated that
a binary chopping algorithm would be used. Someone queried this,
stating that a hashing algorithm would be better suited to the task.
The reply was "What's a hashing algorithm?". Last I heard the person
who made this quote was a director of the last major defence contractor
in the UK.
--
Cheers.
Mark Lawrence.
More information about the Python-list
mailing list