To me it feels like a microcosm of the difference between academic vs pragmatic thinking. The reason to use a quicksort is not because it's elegant and consise,

To me it feels like a microcosm of the difference between academic vs pragmatic thinking. The reason to use a quicksort is not because it's elegant and consise, it's because it is fast and memory efficient. When your implementation of an algorithm is actually an algorithm with asymptotically worse memory characteristics, it's not suitable for any real world production code, and this difference is _not_ pedantic. This is what gets me: Haskell articles tend not to stop at presenting this is as a neat and elegant definition of a sort (which it is!) but emphasize that you're a just being picky if you're not willing to brush aside memory usage and reasoning about such in production code.