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Software Engineering

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    To expand on your last section: It's possible for an algorithm to be theoretically "faster" than another in terms of its Big-O classification, but useless in practice because the n required is larger than can possibly fit in a computer's memory. In which case it's called a galactic algorithm. Commented Oct 7, 2021 at 0:25
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    As an example, in actual use, the Scala core library supports immutable sets, and since they are immutable, a set of size 4 uses a class that handles sets of exactly size 4, with linear search instead of hashing or binary search. Commented Oct 7, 2021 at 7:23