Go rant

[Walter Bright]

bearophile wrote:
> Please ask if you have missed my two points, because they must be 
> understood if you want to design a modern language.

I believe I do get it. After all, look at D's support for functional
programming (immutable and pure).

I wrote the post in reply to "Can you show one example that looks uglier
in Scala, but looks decent in D or some other language?" Whatever the
advantages of FP, and there are many, to keep trotting out the qsort
example front and center is a huge mistake. The Haskell qsort example is
horrible in that it purports to show how elegant and simple FP is, but
instead shows a misguided and essentially useless implementation.

The Haskell qsort example is not only the VERY FIRST example given for
the language on the INTRODUCTORY PAGE of the Haskell wiki, and is under
the heading "What's good about functional programming?". There is no
mention in the text of any of the egregious shortcomings of the example.


> Note that for real sorting purposes you don't use that onliner, you
> use some kind of system sort.

In other words, the #1 example of how great Haskell is sucks and is 
useless for real programming.

The Haskell folks really need to find a better canonical example.