eli5 what’s the point of having so many sorting algorithms if the primary objective is to sort, i mean why can’t we just use one algorithm for all
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Generally we want to sort as fast as possible. We rank how fast algorithms are with big O notation, you’ll see things like O(n^2), O(n * log (n)) etc. This says how much slower the algorithm gets as he number of items (n) you are sorting gets bigger. So you’d think O(n^2) is always slower than O(n * log (n)), but that isn’t necessarily true for small values of n. So if you are sorting just a few items, the ‘slower’ algorithm might actually be better because there is less setup time.
Other algorithms may have other weaknesses. They may perform worse poorly if there are a lot of duplicate values. They may perform poorly if the data is almost sorted.
You may want a stable sort. That is if you have two equal values, their order isn’t changed.
Generally, you can use the standard sort algorithm that comes with your language of choice. However, if you run into performance problems, you may need a specialized sort.
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