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Comment by boltzmannbrain | Hacker News Reader

"never heard of"?? I would hope all Python devs at some point Google "What algorithm is Python's built-in sort function?"...

https://docs.python.org/2/howto/sorting.html#sort-stability-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10948920/what-algorithm-...

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Great, yet another True-Scotsman of being a proper developer. There is so much you should have read, googled, written to be a "True" dev these days. My theory is - if you are often learning stuff and producing good working code be happy. Not every developer needs to know the underlying sort algorithms.

The person never said that you had to google it to be a "proper developer", just that they hoped that every python developer would have done so.

I hate to disappoint that hope but I have never search for Python's sorting algorithm.

What about the hash strategy used in dicts? I'm holding on to hope.

Understanding where a system breaks is a pretty critical part of "producing good working code," at least for definitions of "good" beyond "closes the bite-sized, cog-in-a-machine story assigned to me in this sprint." I'd hope that any developer making decisions of note in a nontrivial system was at least dimly aware of their language's sort complexity.

How often are you sorting something where N is great enough for it to matter how the sorting works? I spend most of my time choosing data structures such that sorting anything other than handful of elements is unnecessary.

His point is a great many people are familiar with this algorithm by way of working with Python.

You can certainly be happy not knowing the tools of your trade very intimately, but that's definitely not something to encourage.

I took the tone to be more incredulous with the "??" and "I would hope".

If you want to master how Timsort works and get a feel for it, I highly suggest you try to implement it yourself!

This article is based on Tim Peters’ original introduction to Timsort, found here.

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