[taeric]

What is the speed of this on N of 16 to 20? At 8, any implementation should suffice nowdays.

Edit: Also, apologies for the possibly ninja edit. This is ultimately somewhat silly. I am not going to lie and say that the these are easily readable. I fully cede that this could just be a training thing. I picked this particular example because I had fun with it using the DLX algorithm. Which is admittedly far above my understanding in many ways. :) Just the naive recursive solution was much easier to read, but much much slower to execute. To the point that it was laughable. (If interested, I can post my code.)

[art-w]

This example is bizarre, because a fast implementation is probably going to rely on a SAT solver, at which point the "queens code" (in any language) becomes a declarative specification of the solution!

Also, I don't think that Haskell, OCaml, (or Prolog) are that much declarative: They have a very clear evaluation model, which you need to know in order to write any code. They also have debuggers as a result.

[taeric]

That was what my point was supposed to be. Just like saying that "foo.sorted()" is more declarative than looking at the implementation of quicksort. However, the implementation of quicksort (that is actually fast) is much easier to understand in most imperative implementations than it is otherwise.

Regardless, I do apologize for the noise.

[codygman]

> They have a very clear evaluation model, which you need to know in order to write any code.

What programming languages don't require you knowing their evaluation model?