[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Andrew Coppin]

Donn Cave wrote:
> Quoth Bill Atkins <watkins at alum.rpi.edu>,
>
>   
>> No, not really.  Linked lists are very easy to deal with recursively and
>> Strings automatically work with any already-defined list functions.
>>     
>
> Yes, they're great - a terrible mistake, for a practical programming
> language, but if you fail to recognize the attraction, you miss some of
> the historical lesson on emphasizing elegance and correctness over
> practical performance.
>   

And if you fail to recognise what a grave mistake placing performance 
before correctness is, you end up with things like buffer overflow 
exploits, SQL injection attacks, the Y2K bug, programs that can't handle 
files larger than 2GB or that don't understand Unicode, and so forth. 
All things that could have been almost trivially avoided if everybody 
wasn't so hung up on absolute performance at any cost.

Sure, performance is a priority. But it should never be the top 
priority. ;-)