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It’s straightforward to a programmer. Who doesn’t need an ikea diagram in the first place.

This is why developer docs are trash. Because 90% of us can’t even identify when we are talking over everyone’s heads.

Am I alone in that I always felt like mergesort was easier to explain (and the O(n lg n) behaviour was easier to prove)?

Merge Sort is much easier to explain when you do the non-recursive version that's upside-down. Merge size 1 together, merge size 2 together, merge size 4 together, merge size 8 together, etc...

O(n lg n) is indeed hard to prove for quicksort, because it is not even true in the general case. Worst case is O(n^2).

> Because the recursive implementation is surprisingly straightforward and concise

It's also technically not quicksort