Go rant

[Daniel de Kok]

On 2009-12-22 10:43:17 +0100, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> said:
> 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 are better examples of 'shining succes' in FP. For example, 
consider the very clear and terse examples of balancing binary search 
trees or heaps in the Okasaki book. DSLs are also another good example 
where FP works very well. However, these examples are probably too long 
to catch attention from a casual reader browsing the haskell.org, or as 
an introductary example of functional languages.

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

'ML for the working programmer' is certainly one of the better FP 
programming texts I have seen, and it discusses various sorting 
algorithms and how they work (with the head as a pivot in quicksorting 
:p). But how is that problematic? Some of good programming books will 
end up being used in CS curricula, and then it's useful to learn 
something along the way, rather than have a dry treaty about yet 
another language.

-- Daniel