Hey folks! I think this request is right up this comm’s alley. I’m sure that we all know bogo sort but, what other terrible/terribly inefficient algorithms, software architecture, or design choices have you been horrified/amused by?
I, sadly, lost a great page of competing terrible sorting algorithms, but I’ll lead with JDSL as a terrible (and terribly inefficient) software architecture and design. The TL;DR is that a fresh CS guy got an internship at a company that based its software offering around a custom, DSL based on JSON that used a svn repo to store all functions in different commits. The poor intern had a bad time due to attempting to add comments to the code, resulting in customer data loss.
I can’t find the name/source at the moment, but if you enumerate all turing machines and run them concurrently* you will find the optimal algorithm for your problem in O(1) and executed that.
To my knowledge the algorithm is so inefficient on small input that it takes hours to solve integer addition.
* You run the first turing machine one step, than the first two one additional step, that the first tree… This allows you to run an unlimited amount of TMs an unlimited amount of steps.