It seems a bit of a broad generalisation to say "Haskellers have a hard time translating an algorithm" based on who happened to be on the IRC channel at the time and decided to answer a challenge from a random C++ programmer who turned up.
Anyway, Haskell is perfectly decent at implementing your algorithm, and imperative algoritms in general. He's a more-or-less direct translation
http://lpaste.net/132519
There's extra noise related to wrapping and unwrapping mutable cells which I could tidy up if I had the time, otherwise it's essentially identical.
In any case the author of the post in question, Bartosz Milewski, is an expert in C++ and not particularly an expert in Haskell, so your point seems misdirected.
And of course the root of this conversation was mistaken in the first place. The algorithm Bartosz is presenting is the b!/(b-n)! algorithm that just examines each permutation once.
> It seems a bit of a broad generalisation to say "Haskellers have a hard time translating an algorithm" based on who happened to be on the IRC channel at the time and decided to answer a challenge from a random C++ programmer who turned up.
I'm not a "C++ programmer". I'm just a programmer. I happened to have the algorithm written in C++, but I could quite easily have written it in pseudocode.
I got about 6 responses in 20 minutes. Four of those were O(m^n). Yes, I think this is quite indicative that Haskellers have a hard time writing performant code.
Anyway, Haskell is perfectly decent at implementing your algorithm, and imperative algoritms in general. He's a more-or-less direct translation
There's extra noise related to wrapping and unwrapping mutable cells which I could tidy up if I had the time, otherwise it's essentially identical.In any case the author of the post in question, Bartosz Milewski, is an expert in C++ and not particularly an expert in Haskell, so your point seems misdirected.