bubble sort

n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent
values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are
out of order; thus, list entries bubble upward in the list until they bump
into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to
other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored
programmers, hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm.
(However, it's been shown by repeated experiment that below about 5000
records bubble-sort is OK anyway.) The canonical example of a really bad
algorithm is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but
any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful
perversity.

