At first I didn't think I'd be interested.
> Using some efficiency techniques, it is twice as fast as quicksort for large sets of strings.
> Using some efficiency techniques, it is twice as fast as quicksort for large sets of strings.
It’s an in-place bucket sort which is interesting.
> The name American flag sort comes by analogy with the Dutch national flag problem[2] in the last step: efficiently partition the array into many "stripes".
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_flag_sort
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_national_flag_problem
...or from the very article itself...
I agree with you, the name is ridiculous, reminds me of miracle sort or intelligent design sort: https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/intelligentdesignsort.h...
Probably those two flag sort algorithms were named before the joke algorithms were popularily known.