alt Hacker NewsWell, it came out a while ago, so maybe we can be a bit silly:
There’s something sort of beautiful about mergesort and heapsort. Their names tell you what their main idea is, and how they work is immediately obvious.
Quicksort, on the other hand, has nothing beautiful about it and is named after it’s one redeeming feature (that it is quick for a lot of cases).
Replies
thesz • yesterday at 7:51 PM
The beauties of quicksort are that it sorts in-place and that it is embarrassingly simple.
The in-place property can be utilized to make it very close to cache-oblivious algorithm.
teiferer • yesterday at 7:51 PM
How is it less beautiful?
Honest question, curious to hear about what that means to you.
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Maybe if Hoare had called it Partitionsort in 1960, the name wouldn’t have been memorable enough to catch on and become so popular.