Go rant

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:4B2FCF53.9050608 at erdani.org...
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> retard wrote:
>>> I have several imperative language programming books and instead of 
>>> qsort they introduce the reader to the wonderful world of bubble sort!
>>
>> Bubble sort should be part of an introductory programming course, if only 
>> because:
>>
>> 1. it's an algorithm that gets reinvented if one is not aware of it
>>
>> 2. one needs to be able to recognize it, as one will encounter it a lot 
>> in production code
>>
>> 3. it's a great way to introduce concepts like big O
>>
>> 4. it's a great stepping stone to introducing better sorts
>>
>>
>> I've run into bubble sort reimplementations in production code written by 
>> famous programmers who should know better. It happens all the time.
>
> Fro your arguments 1-4 and your conclusion, I infer you made a slight 
> typo. Let me fix that for you.
>
> s/should be/should not be/
>

It should be "should be", for the same reason and in the same way that the 
"waterfall" development model *should be* taught: Presenting it up front as 
conceptually-easy-but-generally-a-bad-thing-to-do will help people identify 
it and therefore avoid it. Not teaching about it increases the chances that 
they'll either rediscover it or come across a usage of it without actually 
noticing that there's a problem. It would be like selling sodium without 
including a warning that it explodes upon contact with water (Or something 
like that, anyway, I never actually took chemistry...).