As a kid I once saw a quicksort implemented in BASIC and it looked like magic to me. I thought how could anyone come up with this algorithm…. Then I saw it imp

As a kid I once saw a quicksort implemented in BASIC and it looked like magic to me. I thought how could anyone come up with this algorithm…. Then I saw it implemented recursively in lisp…it was the simplest most obvious choice to make, and it was hard to imagine anything else. Now I think that the BASIC implementation must have been a translation from the lisp or something equivalent and it would have been very unlikely that any native BASIC programmer would have come up with it on their own. Of course it used GOTOs. With the proper abstraction level any complex algorithm becomes trivial.