This might be a good time to refresh our memories on this story. Back in
the golden days of 2007, candidate Barack Obama dazzled a techie
audience with his answer to a technology question:
'Asked by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt what the most efficient
way to sort a million 32-bit integers is, Obama said the wrong way would
be the "bubble sort method," which is a basic but inefficient method for
sorting numbers. "You answered the question correctly," Schmidt said.'
Anybody who's ever taken even a basic programming class knows that the
"bubble sort" algorithm - which sorts a list of numbers by comparing
each successive term to its neighboring terms - is the easiest to
understand and to code, but the least efficient way of sorting a long
list. I'm no computer geek, but even I could have told you that much.
But Obama had the gift for saying the right words at the right time to
the right people. In the minds of the geeks at Google, he was "one of them".
And now? Is Obama still "Google-like" now?
