Hey folks! I think this request is right up this comm’s alley. I’m sure that we all know bogo sort but, what other terrible/terribly inefficient algorithms, software architecture, or design choices have you been horrified/amused by?
I, sadly, lost a great page of competing terrible sorting algorithms, but I’ll lead with JDSL as a terrible (and terribly inefficient) software architecture and design. The TL;DR is that a fresh CS guy got an internship at a company that based its software offering around a custom, DSL based on JSON that used a svn repo to store all functions in different commits. The poor intern had a bad time due to attempting to add comments to the code, resulting in customer data loss.
No, I won’t give you my github.
slow inverse square root:
float slowinvsqrt(float x)
{
const long accuracy = 100000000; // larger number = better accuracy
if (x <= 0.0f) {
return NAN;
}
if (x == 1.0f) {
return 1.0f;
}
if (x < 1.0f) {
return 1.0f / slowinvsqrt(1.0f/x);
}
int max_power = log(accuracy) / log(x);
long pow1 = pow(x, max_power - 1);
long pow2 = pow(x, max_power);
double current = 1.0;
double previous = 1.0;
for (long i = 0; i<10*accuracy; i++) {
current = sin(current);
if (i == pow1) {
previous = current;
}
if (i == pow2) {
return current / previous;
}
}
}
