Kernighan Names Every Algorithm

Description

The top panel uses the Gru-with-a-gun meme format, with large white text saying "OH YOU'RE A PROGRAMMER" and "NAME EVERY ALGORITHM" while Gru points a weapon toward the viewer. The bottom panel shows Brian Kernighan smiling in an office-like setting, captioned "QSORT & BSEARCH". The post metadata says "Brian Kernighan knows every algorithm", grounding the joke in C and Unix programming culture. The punchline is that a veteran C programmer can reduce the impossible demand to two familiar standard-library workhorses: `qsort` for sorting and `bsearch` for lookup.

Common Tags

Algorithm AlgorithmDesign CSFundamentals CStandardLibrary CFamilyLanguages SortingAlgorithms DataStructures TechHistory UnixCulture TechnicalInterviews DeveloperInJokes ComputerScienceEducation

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Decades of algorithm discourse, reduced to two function pointers and a comparator that still somehow returns the wrong sign once a year.

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Decades of algorithm discourse, reduced to two function pointers and a comparator that still somehow returns the wrong sign once a year.