Now, if you’ve ever heard of sorting algorithms before and thought to yourself “Meh, who cares?

To kick things off: what the ***** is heap sort anyway? Well, it’s basically like building a giant pyramid of numbers (or any other data type you want to sort) and then taking them out in order from the top. Sounds simple enough, right? But wait how do we build this pyramid thingy?

Enter: the heap! A heap is just a fancy way of saying “a tree-like structure where each node’s value is greater than or equal to its children.” (Or less than for min heaps.) This means that if you start with an unsorted list and build a heap from it, the largest number will end up at the top.

So how do we turn our unsorted list into a heap? Well, first we’re going to create a function called “heapify” (because why not) which takes in an array of numbers and starts by finding the last node in the tree (which is always the parent of the leftmost leaf). Then it compares that value with its children if either child is smaller than the parent, we swap them.

We keep doing this for every node until we reach the root (the top of our pyramid) and then we’re done! This process is called “sifting down” because we’re essentially sifting through the heap to find the largest value at the end.

Now that we have a sorted heap, how do we get those numbers out in order? Well, we start by taking the root (the largest number) and removing it from our heap. Then we replace it with the last node in the tree (which is always the rightmost leaf), and then “sift down” again to make sure that value is still greater than or equal to its children.

We keep doing this until all of the nodes have been removed, at which point we’re left with a sorted list! And voila heap sort for Big Data!

So why use heap sort instead of other algorithms like quicksort or mergesort? Well, for one thing, it has a time complexity of O(n log n) in the worst case (which is pretty ***** good). It’s also great for situations where you have limited memory because it doesn’t require any extra space to sort your data.

But perhaps most importantly, heap sort just sounds really cool when you say it out loud “heap sort”! Who wouldn’t want to use that in their next project? So give it a try I promise it won’t be as scary as it seems (at least not compared to quicksort).