• Justin Johansson <no spam.com> Dec 22 2009

Justin Johansson <no spam.com> writes:

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

 retard wrote:
 Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:04:32 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 
 Walter Bright wrote:
 The Haskell folks really need to find a better canonical example.


 The footnote says (how the hell did this make it through the editorial
 pass???)

 "This code is shown for its elegance rather than its efficiency. Using
 ++ in this way is not generally considered good programming practice."

 So if the code is inefficient and in poor programming practice, how in
 this blessed world could it count as elegant?


 to do but to bash all books written by users of competitive languages. 
 How low..


 Apparently I haven't managed to qualify my statements well enough - I 
 tried to make it clear I'm not going for cheap shots, so I'm a bit 
 puzzled that you fell exactly for that.
 
 I'm 100% sure I can find a suboptimal programming example from some C/C++/
 D book.


 Yah, but that's not the one that's featured prominently as one of the 
 coolest examples there is, and it wouldn't be horrendously bad. 
 Virtually all introductions to FP contain this ridiculous qsort. It 
 should be dipped in tar and feathers and showed around the town.
 
 Just like an operating system implementation book discusses Minix 
 or some educational kernel, it's not really a surprise that programming 
 books have naive examples.  I'm not really interested to hear how latest
 win7 or linux 2.6.33 kernel patch solves some SATA2 / btrfs issue when 
 reading about filesystems and buses. You should take those words about 
 relative elegance with a grain of salt. Functional code is usually less 
 verbose, less buggy, a bit less efficient due to many issues etc. These 
 are things most professionals agree with. Apparently D users need to 
 enhance their e-dick by ranting about everything that's not done in d 
 just to get a tiny bit of publicity.


 I think it would grow yours to understand what functional qsort's 
 problems are.


Don't have much time to read D NG these days but I saw this and felt it fair to
reply.

"Elegant" FP qsorts are the aquintessential, useless big O, examples of
academic FP (as opposed to real-world, practical FP).

Gotta give Andrei due for his command of the English language.  Sometimes he
sounds like a modern day Shakespeare.

"... introductions to FP contain this ridiculous qsort. It should be dipped in
tar and feathers and showed around the town"

Disagree though; having watched The Scarlet Pimpernel last night, I'd rather
suggest the guillotine?

 Apparently D users need to 
 enhance their e-dick by ranting about everything that's not done in d 
 just to get a tiny bit of publicity.




Currently I wouldn't classify myself as a D user but think that very unfair
statement is well deserving of Andrei's curt reply:

"... it would grow yours to understand what functional qsort's problems are."

Justin Johansson