On Monday, 26 August 2013 at 03:44:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
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
@Andrei, @deadalnix, @Meta, @bearophile
I see, performance sucks and this function only kind of looks
like a quicksort. It makes sense putting this 'quicksort" and
recursive Fibonacci and factorial in the same bag of ivory tower
ideas, otherwise known as Haskell. But it looked so nice :-(
