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hjoutfbkfdtoday at 11:33 AM3 repliesview on HN

when you inplement a quick sort, do you credit Hoare in the comments?


Replies

jakkostoday at 11:50 AM

No, in the same way that I wouldn't cite Euler every time I used one of his theorems - because it's so well known that its history is well documented in countless places.

However, if I was using a more recent/niche/unknown theorem, it would absolutely be considered bad practice not to cite where I got it from.

OJFordtoday at 12:10 PM

If I was implementing any known (named) algorithm intentionally I think I would absolutely say so in a comment (`// here we use quick sort to...` and maybe why it's the choice) and then it's easy for someone to look up and see it's due to Hoare or whoever on Wikipedia etc.

antireztoday at 11:37 AM

Now many will downvote you because this is an algorithm and not some code. But the reality is that programming is in large part built looking at somebody else code / techniques, internalizing them, and reproducing them again with changes. So actually it works like that for code as well.