On 8/25/13 6:16 PM, Paul Jurczak wrote:
On Sunday, 25 August 2013 at 23:16:17 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
On 26/08/13 01:06, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
This is one of the worst PR functional programming has ever gotten,
and one of
the worst things FP has done to the larger community. Somebody should
do hard
time for this. And yes, for that matter it's a great example in which
SLOCs are
not a very good measure.
I thought you'd like me bringing this up. ;-)
You still have a chance, because I don't quite get it. With the little I
know about Haskell, I find this code very elegant. What is wrong with
it? Performance?
I ranted about that a couple of times (including during my DConf talk).
In brief:
1. quicksort is based on in-place partition, so at best that example is
a different (and less adequate) algorithm inspired from quicksort.
2. choosing the first element as pivot yields quadratic performance on
almost sorted sequence, which is a common practical case.
That example is part of a toxic trifecta (also including the
doubly-exponential fibonacci and the O(N) space factorial) that has done
a lot of bad teaching.
Andrei
