Well put! Taking author's basic proposition to its logical conclusion shows that faulting Scala for this is wrong. Scala has illuminated the author to a pedant

Well put! Taking author's basic proposition to its logical conclusion shows that faulting Scala for this is wrong. Scala has illuminated the author to a pedantic dissonance in academia: in this case, that true asymptotic analyses should be using O(logn) instead of O(1) for random memory access. Hence why algorithms like Hoare's quicksort are so fast, they actually are Theta(nlogn) in practice because linear memory access looks like O(1) on modern machines. (but again pedantically it is probably still O(logn) from gate depth of multiplexing/demultiplexing the architecture's pointer size.) Edit: Remembering that O((logn)^2) = O(logn), I suppose the author is probably correct.