During a coffee break I mentioned that “even though the kids prefer schnitzel I’d rather prepare baked chicken”
When asked why I explained that “Chicken is O(1) and schnitzel is O(N)“.
This is a case in which the joy of using jargon colloquially overrides strict correctness. Obviously making chicken isn’t O(1) even if you do have an infinitely large oven.
Image stolen from gas-grill-review.com
Then again the complexity of finding an element in an unsorted sequence isn’t really O(N) either, it’s O(N * Max(Cmp(a, b))). Comparing objects can often be considered O(1) (e.g. 32 bit integers) but if you want to compare books by the number of the times the letter e show up in them, well then, comparing War and Peace to Les Misérables is far from constant speed (you could use A Void as the null book</aside>)
The real[1] reasons I prefer making chicken to schnitzel are twofold.
- The constants are much bigger for schnitzel
- Schnitzel making is synchronous while baking chicken is asynchronous
And don’t get me started about the space dirty dishes complexity.
- Of course how healthy the food is doesn’t count as a consideration, we are geeks here after all. ↩
