This always strikes me as odd. Personally, had I heard about it, I would never come up with bubble sort myself, nor any of my friends I asked about it. The most intuitive sorting algorithm is obviously selection sort. I'd even say that merge sort is more conceptually clear than bubble sort. Bubble sort is not much easier to implement than selection sort either. It has no interesting properties which make it worth considering (unlike, for instance, insertion sort). The only possibility of one knowing bubble sort is by hearing about it on algorithms classes, and in that case one already know heapsort and quicksort, so that there is no need for bubble sort.
To sum up, I fear bubble sort in production much, much less than, say, selection sort.
> The only possibility of one knowing bubble sort is by hearing about it on algorithms classes,
That's simply not true. I know for a fact that for me personally the bubble sort was the most "intuitive" algorithm because when I was in elementary school we had a computer club, and we were given the task for figuring out how to sort a list. My implementation was a bubble-sort, and at the time I had absolutely no knowledge of sorting algorithms at all.
Obviously different people will find different things "intuitive".
Try asking 10 colleagues to right now write bubble sort on the white board. I bet at least half write some sorting algorithm that is not bubble sort. In contrast, if you ask these same 10 to do quicksort, you'll end up with 10 quicksort implementations.
