Go rant

[Walter Bright]

Daniel de Kok wrote:
> I do not mind it, it's ok for explaining a concept clearly. Of course, 
> inadequacies should also be discussed. I'd argue that these are also the 
> thinking steps normally involved in designing a solution to a problem: 
> first try to solve it in the obvious way to understand the problem. 
> Then, make a more performant implementation. Of course, performant also 
> depends on the context. I have written a lot of C++ code that tries to 
> squeeze the last bit of performance out of the machine in a single-core 
> world, but it is also difficult to parallelize. In a parallel world, the 
> 'slower' solution is sometimes better.

One of the big problems with the presentations of the functional qsort 
is that it is presented as a shining success of FP, when it is anything 
but. There may be later a footnote or comment that it is not suitable, 
but those appear to be written as afterthoughts and do not clearly lay 
out what the problems are.

Furthermore, an introductory FP programming text should be about how to 
write useful programs in FP, not about how sorting algorithms work.