[Haskell-cafe] To [] Or Not To []

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

> On 10/03/2017, at 8:19 PM, Geraldus <heraldhoi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "It is more important to have the right problem
> done the wrong way, than to have the wrong problem done
> the right way." 
> 
> Sounds like a nonsense.  Does  "problem done the wrong way" implies the problem indeed isn't solved at all, doesn't it?

Absolutely not.

I remember back in about 1979 reading a procedure published
in an engineering journal and noticing at once that it took
O(n**5) time when simple manipulations familiar to any good
programmer would have made it O(n**2). To my way of thought
that was "done the wrong way", but the engineers who wrote
it were happy with what it did for them and the reviewers
are apparently happy that it gave the right answers.

Similarly, a program that needs 2MB of temporary data and
opens a connection to Oracle, stuffs the data into a
scratch table, and pulls it back later (without needing
ACID and without using anything more than SELECT * FROM TABLE)
is again to my mind doing it the wrong way, but if it gives
the right answers fast enough, the goal donor may not care.

The classic example from Java, bringing us back to the topic
of lists and strings, is

    String dumpMap(HashMap<String,Thing> map) {
        String s = "";
	for (Map.Entry<String,Thing> e : map.entrySet()) {
	    s += "\t" + e.getKey() + "='" +
		e.getValue().toString() + "'\n";
	}
	return s;
    }

which takes quadratic time -- assuming Thing::toString() is
cheap -- when using a StringBuilder would make it linear.
This is taken from a real program I have been trying to
clean up to make Java 1.8 stop complaining about it.  Not
my code, I hasten to add.  The result is the result that
the author intended -- at least that's true of the original
rather messier code -- but it is done the wrong way.

I have known something not unlike this make the difference
between a program taking 0.5 seconds and the same program
taking 5 minutes, so "done the wrong way" but not "wrong
answers".  At 5 minutes, the program was still in fact useful.
This happened just last week and that one *was* my code.
(Not in Java, and not string concatenation.  Failing to purge
useless but logically harmless data from a collection.)