Comment by petsfed

I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where "printing out the number in a human readable format" is more time consuming than "figuring out what the number is".

I think a competent programmer might also ask themselves "am I prematurely optimizing?" if their first instinct is to pick the method that only works on a computer. I've operated in this space long enough that bit shifting is synonymous with doing the logarithm in my mind, but if I had to explain how my code works, I would use the logarithm explanation. I would be sure to point out that the computer does log (base 2) of a number much much MUCH faster than any other base.

Its probably excessive to say that literally every one is taught logarithms as the ideal solution to this problem, but logarithms are almost universally introduced by explaining that the log (base 10) of a number is always greater than or equal to the number of digits in that base 10 number. So if you completed a high school education in the United States, you have almost certainly heard that much at least.

edit: printing out the number is almost always gonna be faster than figuring out the value of the number, if the speed of the operation matters. My original post implied the opposite. Part of being a competent programmer is recognizing that optimizing is sometimes bikeshedding.