Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

Re:Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've e... by bjoli on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:44AM (#21376026)

I say this as a die hard FP fan: I agree with your parent comment. I think FP is generally good enough or sometimes even quite close. But I don't know how many times I ended up writing C in Haskell or scheme to make an algorithm really fast (once all other algorithms have been tried or discarded).

The quicksort example is a shitty quicksort, because it will be slow as molasses. A proper quicksort in Haskell will degrade you to writing C in Haskell (with the benefits of a large standard library)and then you have lost. C in C will always beat C in Haskell or any other language.

Is it a worthwhile tradeoff? I believe so. The few times I am limited by speed in that way are few and far between, and most often it was because I thought something like O(n2) would be good enough which is easily fixable. Sometimes I just need to make optimal code faster. By then I always wish I would be using an imperative language instead.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've e... by tombert on Monday October 28, 2019 @10:34AM (#21377346)

I'm genuinely curious; how often do you actually end up writing sorts in Haskell? I just use the built-in sort function, which is fast enough.

Maybe your use-case is different than mine, but I typically use Haskell (or another functional language) for network applications, which typically don't benefit from tight-loops since the network is almost always the bottleneck anyway. For these kinds of applications, having proper concurrency and IO handling matters a lot more than worrying about whether your loops result in a cache-miss.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've e... by bjoli on Monday October 28, 2019 @11:51AM (#21378018)

I have had a couple of times where the overhead of idiomatic Haskell warranted rewriting it in a mutable imperative way. Sorting was never a problem, but things like functional heaps (leftist or pairing heaps) will never be as efficient as mutable, cache aware ones.

The lower level mucking around when you have to do those kinds of optimizations is, IMO, much more pleasant in imperative languages.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've e... by tombert on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:58PM (#21380954)

Sure, I won't argue with that. I've never used Haskell for that low-level of work, so I can't speak with any kind of expertise on that; I've never found Haskell's FFI to be terribly hard to use though, so you could conceivably get the best of both worlds.

Also, have you tried Liquid Haskell? It uses refinement types to let you use the "unsafe" and fast versions of functions to guarantee correctness while also increasing performance.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've e... by monsieurbanana on Monday October 28, 2019 @08:31AM (#21376258)

Is the level of my English lacking? The comment you're agreeing to clearly seems to argue that fp sucks as a whole because it's not as fast for tight looped algorithms, not that it sucks only for them.

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