Go rant

[downs]

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.
>> Add to that the Erlang folk, too. I'm reading the book on Erlang by
>> Armstrong. Here's the Quicksort section and example on page 52:
>>
>> "Here's how to write a sort algorithm[footnote] using two list
>> comprehensions."
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> I have gathered a fair amount of samples of involuntary humor from that
>> book. I wouldn't want to go on about that because it could too easily be
>> interpreted as poor taste competitiveness. Let me say I don't think the
>> book is well written.
> 
> So now that you've finished writing your own book you have nothing else 
> to do but to bash all books written by users of competitive languages. 
> How low..
> 

It's his opinion and he, being an author himself, has a better basis for it than you do.

> I'm 100% sure I can find a suboptimal programming example from some C/C++/
> D book.

That's not what he said though - he said the example is inefficient, and *also* that he considers the book to be poorly written.

> 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.

The issue is that what this example demonstrates, is that functional code is apparently _either_ elegant _or_ efficient. This is not a good trade-off to be forced to make.

> 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.

Nice.