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Who cares about time complexity (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by qaz@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 points 13 hours ago

Recursion is amazing for a small selection of problems. Most of the time you don't need, or want, it. When it is useful though, it tends to be really useful.

I don't understand people's issue with it. I always found it easy. Maybe that's why I feel this way. Maybe if you find it challenging you want to avoid it, even when it's a good solution.

[-] kamstrup@programming.dev 3 points 9 hours ago

Most devs I know like recursion. Trouble is that many popular languages don't support tail recursion, but throw a stackoverflow error after a few thousand levels. So you have to keep track of max recursion depth manually, and it starts to look like a complicated solution

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 hours ago

I think, their point (and also my experience) is that you get taught about it in university a lot more than about simple loops, so it feels more important even though you rarely use it in reality.

Same thing goes for linked lists and inheritance...