Go rant

[Walter Bright]

retard wrote:
> The discussion here mostly touts imperative languages with the same old 
> centuries old arguments like "omg functional languages can't do in-place 
> algorithms". "so you need hacks to implement in-place algorithms. that 
> must mean that the elegance of fpl is in fact something that cannot be 
> achieved in real world".

I disagree that this is what this thread is about. FP has a lot of 
insight and great ideas to offer programming. The thread is about *bad 
examples*, and the FP qsort is a *bad example* of FP programming. Every 
paradigm has problems it is ill suited to solve, and FP is ill suited to 
implementing qsort.

For another example, around 1990 the programming world decided that OOP 
was the solution to all programming problems. One of the results of that 
thinking is Java. We've now suffered through the inevitable backlash, 
and a more reasoned consensus these days is that OOP is very well suited 
to solving some problems, and for other problems one should use a 
different paradigm.

As I mentioned to grauzone, D has adopted some essential characteristics 
of FP programming (immutability and purity). So, when you're faced with 
a programming problem that is ideally suited to an FP solution, you can 
do one in D. But you're not forced to use FP for everything, like qsort 
and I/O.


>> Furthermore, an introductory FP programming text should be about how to
>> write useful programs in FP, not about how sorting algorithms work.
> So all the Haskell/Erlang/ML/Scheme books you've read have been really 
> bad?  That only means that there's market for good FPL books, then!

Any FP programming text that puts the one line qsort front and center as 
an example of how great FP is is a book that has room for improvement, 
you bet.