Discussion: Reasoning about complexity before optimising
Entries
'Measure before optimising' is right for existing code, but at design time you cannot measure, and the choice of data structure or query shape is exactly where asymptotic reasoning is the only tool. An O(n²) design that is fine at 1 000 items is an outage at 100 000, and it is far cheaper to avoid than to fix later. The article underweights the design-time role of complexity analysis.
A reminder that constant factors dominate at the sizes most services handle: a linear scan over a hundred items in memory beats a hash lookup that requires building the hash first, and a nested loop over two ten-element lists is not a performance problem. The article's advice to measure before restructuring is the right frame; complexity classes matter once n grows with the data.
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