Wikipedia talk:Algorithms on Wikipedia/More talk

A couple of points:

• OOP is about programming in the large. For programming in the small (to provide illustrative examples of algorithms, for instance), OOP is just a bunch of unnecessary cruft. Hence, Java and C++ don't add very much over C for the purpose of illustrating fundamental algorithms, and the cruft gets in the way of understanding.
• Some of the HLL's (Perl, for instance), aren't exactly ideal for describing implementations of data structures (trees, hash tables etc).
• As far as the untestability of pseudocode, most algorithms we present should be verifiable by inspection.
• Perl looks ugly and encourages, er, idiosyncratic coding. It's great for getting jobs done. It's bad for presenting examples in, IMHO.
• Of course, I think we should present most of our algorithms in something like Haskell, but I can't see us winning that argument :) --Robert Merkel