alt Hacker NewsI can’t think of a single time I’ve needed a sorted list of only numbers. It’s always numbers and something else, like names or dates. Maybe for median calculations, but I don’t even use those that much either. Especially in telemetry, where mean is easy and median is not.
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vlovich123 • yesterday at 7:37 PM
If the primary key is the number, it still works (and dates are just numbers by the way) because you can sort a heterogenous dataset by a single numeric key pretty trivially.
But sorting by arbitrary strings like names can’t avoid comparison sort.
To be pedantic, median is cheaper than sorting. O(n) with a quicksort-like algorithm.
Also, if you're taking an average of floating point numbers, you might want to sort it first and add from smallest to largest, to better preserve precision