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Poll: Are you familiar with Bachmann-Landau notation/Are you a good developer?

2 points by bane ↗ HN
How many people know the details of algorithm design w/r to the family of Bachmann–Landau notations? Scott_s and I are having a friendly debate concerning software engineers that know Bachmann-Landau as a prerequisite for competency as a developer.

Here's the thread in question - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322716

8 comments

[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
bartonfink
I have never heard of it by that name, and yes I'm familiar with the standard five relations. Are you calling it "Bachmann-Landau" for a reason?
marssaxman
Never heard of "Bachmann-Landau". Big-o is of course familiar.
georgecmu
Big-O, little-o, omega -- yes, these are all familiar, but never heard this notation be referred to as Bachmann–Landau.
scott_s
bane, you're new here, so please read this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Above all, we want people to be civil. I find this whole thing borderline.

bane
Well that was a rather non-sequitur statement and link.

Anything in particular you object to? I seem to recall that you were the one that suggested that somebody could not possibly be a good developer without a strong understanding of Bachmann-Landau notation and the associated complexity theory. That's rather insulting of an awful lot of quite good professional working developers in my book. Pardon me if I take umbrage with stabs at me and my colleague's profession.

I know that you've spent a great deal of time working towards your PhD (congratulations btw), but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you've never worked for any significant length of time on production systems out in the world. In my younger years I too worked in academia (for an actual for real Nuke Lab believe it or not). It's a vastly different world, with different notions of what's necessary, what's useful and what's required to operate in the respective worlds.

The transition betwixt the two was not easy for me as I often rallied for far more rigor than was needed or required for any day to day development task. Why didn't we have a documented mathematically rigorous proof of the validity of the login system?! Ye gads! How can people operate this way? How come nobody knows the strict storage and space requirements of such and such algorithm?! What do you mean nobody can give me a provable upper and lower bound runtime for this query, you say "it's guarantee to finish before the Universe grows cold?"!?!?! How can the world function?! You mean nobody has ever calculated an average estimate for these portions of the queuing system?! What kind of knuckle dragging place is this?!

But you know what, things got built, they more or less worked, we got payed and then we moved on to the next project.

The poll could go either way and show either you or me right -- or open up good discussion. I think I phrased the question fairly and offered a fair set of choices. If you have a choice to add, feel free to suggest it and I'll add it.

I've tried to have good humor about this so far, I think it would be a good idea if you just lighten up a little and enjoy the stimulating debate instead of trying to bully new people around.

I'll also refer you to your own link:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

If you don't like how the conversation is going, for whatever reason, just flag me and let the admins deal with it.

One final thought: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2323831

scott_s
I am conducting myself politely. My objection is to the snark when disagreeing with me.