Go rant

[Justin Johansson]

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?
> >>
> > 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..
> 
> 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