Space complexity Memes

Welcome to 2024, where RAM costs more than your kidney and suddenly everyone's rediscovering DFS like it's some ancient wisdom. For decades, BFS was the go-to for graph traversal because who cares about O(n) space when RAM is cheap, right? Just throw more memory at it! But now with the global RAM shortage and prices skyrocketing, developers are frantically switching to DFS with its beautiful O(h) space complexity for tree traversals. The irony? Computer science professors have been preaching space-time tradeoffs since forever, but it took an economic crisis for devs to actually care about that queue eating up all your precious gigabytes. Stack-based recursion is having its redemption arc, and somewhere a CS101 professor is saying "I told you so."

The brutal moment when you realize your CS professor wasn't kidding about Big O notation. Four years of studying sorting algorithms only to discover that in the real world, the difference between O(n) and O(n²) is whether your AWS bill makes the CFO cry or not. Time complexity isn't just theoretical—it's financial complexity with extra steps!