On: I Am a Bad Developer

[boyter]

Agreed. However it would probably be better to show someone some code with a loop in a loop and ask them why it could potentially be a problem.

If they can tell you in Big O notation why its bad for large inputs then great, but so long as they can tell you why that's what really matters.

[jtheory → boyter]

Right -- Big O notation is a useful formalization of a thinking process that in practice usually includes more information.

That is -- anytime you write a loop, you'd better think about what's inside it (and how long those things will take), and -- given the amount of data you might be sending through that loop -- if that's a problem or not.

I want someone to notice that they're making a remote call in a loop when it could be batched, cached, etc.. I don't want them to spend 2 days optimizing an algorithm tinkering with a bit of text that yes, is inefficient, but in practice is only going to take a few milliseconds anyway and isn't a hotspot.