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The World of YouTube Bubble Sort Algorithm Dancing
theodp writes In addition to The Ghost of Steve Jobs, The Codecracker, a remix of 'The Nutcracker' performed by Silicon Valley's all-girl Castilleja School during Computer Science Education Week earlier this month featured a Bubble Sort Dance. Bubble Sort dancing, it turns out, is more popular than one might imagine. Search YouTube, for example, and you'll find students from the University of Rochester to Osmania University dancing to sort algorithms. Are you a fan of Hungarian folk-dancing? Well there's a very professionally-done Bubble Sort Dance for you! Indeed, well-meaning CS teachers are pushing kids to Bubble Sort Dance to hits like Beauty and a Beat, Roar, Gentleman, Heartbeat, Under the Sea, as well as other music.
A key part of all database systems is the fact that you can ask for a sort order without having to write a sort program. While simple sorts can move quickly, a bubble sort can move even faster. When you're dealing with a multimillion record table, this saves minutes and power per query.
Everybody develops Bubble Sort the same way, proving it's an eventual discovery that no longer qualifies for patents. Teaching it is a basic way of showing the programming language's loop terms and variable scopes, so it's an elementary program to write.
I guess this dance is reminding us that Bubble Sort can be applied to dating. If the girls rank themselves correctly, it takes a bunch of "go over there..." dates in order to get it right.
And more important than average efficiency, shell sort makes better dances!
No one in their right mind would implement quick sort to sort millions of database entries either though. They'd likely implement something like merge sort.
As others have said, bubble sort is efficient on mostly-sorted datasets. Bubbling sorting your database after every X insertions (for some value of X) or before a search (whichever comes first) makes the world a nicer place.
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