[erlang-questions] Erlang shows its slow face!

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 14/11/2010, at 10:17 PM, Hynek Vychodil wrote:
 Anyway Erlang is not
> right tool for this job. You should use NIF if performance matter.

Erlang is a fine tool for jobs like this one.
In fact, given its support for large integers,
it is about as good for combinatorial algorithms as
Smalltalk, though perhaps not as good as Lisp.
(But see LFE...)

There is little point in optimising a bad algorithm.
A fairly naive rewrite turns it from O(N**3) into O(N**2).
What really counts here is how easy it is to spot the
algorithmic problem and switch to a better algorithm.