Reddit Sort: The World's Least Efficient Algorithm

The Venn diagram of intellectual superiority has spoken, and programmers are social distancing before it was cool! While physicists are busy turning penguins into perfect cylinders, engineers are rounding π to 3 (because who needs those pesky decimals?), and mathematicians are defining e with fancy limits, programmers are off in their own circle with "x = x + 1" - a statement that would make mathematicians have an existential crisis. Notice how programmers don't overlap with anyone? That's not isolation, that's specialization . We're not wrong, we're just using a different paradigm where impossible equations make perfect sense. And let's pour one out for the chemists, reduced to the smallest circle possible - apparently they couldn't even afford proper representation in this diagram hierarchy!

Ah, the infamous donut.c! Non-programmers think we're building fancy holograms and saving the world, but in reality we're spending 14 hours writing ASCII art that renders a spinning torus in the terminal. The absolute peak of C programming isn't creating operating systems—it's crafting mathematically precise donut code that outputs... another donut. It's the programming equivalent of Inception, but with more trigonometry and fewer Leonardo DiCaprios. The real flex isn't that it works, but that someone managed to format the code itself into a donut shape while it generates a donut. That's not just programming—that's art .

Who needs decimal when you've got binary? With 10 fingers, normal folks count to a measly 10, but programmers? We're out here representing each finger as a binary digit (0 or 1), squeezing a full 2^10 = 1024 values from the same hardware. It's the ultimate flex when someone asks you to count on your fingers and you casually hit four digits. The look on their face is worth the years of carpal tunnel from typing.

The eternal battle between "clean code" zealots and the pragmatic hackers who actually ship features. First panel: Someone proudly declares they like "clean code" - that magical unicorn every bootcamp graduate puts on their resume. Second panel: Someone dares to ask what that actually means. Third panel: "It means he's afraid of useful code" - the brutal truth bomb drops. Fourth panel: The clean coder desperately denies it. Final panels: And then we see the "scary" code - a fast inverse square root function that's actually efficient and solves a real problem, but doesn't follow the sacred "clean code" commandments. The horror! Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a "clean code" purist like a function that prioritizes performance over readability. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to make the damn thing work before the deadline.

That moment when you realize you've been in this industry so long that basic concepts have become ancient artifacts. The look of existential dread when a freshman asks what a zip file is... like watching someone question why we still use wheels on cars. Nothing makes you feel more like a digital dinosaur than explaining compression algorithms to kids who grew up with unlimited cloud storage. And here I am, remembering when we passed code around on actual floppy disks.

Oh. My. GOD. The eternal developer personality disorder on full display! One minute you're slapping together code like a toddler with Play-Doh—"it works, ship it!"—and the next you're possessed by some optimization demon, spending 17 hours shaving microseconds off a function nobody will ever notice. The duality is SENDING ME. One day you're writing spaghetti code that would make your CS professor weep, and the next you're crafting a masterpiece that could run on a calculator from 1997. There is NO in-between. We're either lazy geniuses or obsessive maniacs, and I'm exhausted just thinking about which one I'll be tomorrow morning.