Next permutation: When C++ gets it right

Back when I competed regularly in TopCoder for food money in college, std::next_permutation saved my bacon. I got so good at whipping out &#60;algorithm&#62; in C++ that every other language's standard library felt deficient. Python's basically caught up with itertools and the built-in set type.<p>Often you can replace dozens of lines of for loops and if statements with set subtraction and some generator comprehensions. Sometimes the code ends up faster, to boot!

This is one of the most truly balanced, well-written, pragmatic articles I've read on HN. Instead of the typical dogmatic spew that is nearly epidemic in blog posts, it reads more like a scientific paper, but without all the dryness.

Very good tutorial on one of the recent Code Jam problems. The solution does at first seem mysterious, but the article does show how it works nicely.<p>Browsing through some of the solutions to the code jam, c++ seems frequently used. It is also sort of amusing to see how many participants apparently have a stock set of utility code. There is a lot of use of the STL to do things just as the article mentions.<p>The inventor of STL did have some fairly scathing words to say about OO programming.<p>Also, speed does sometimes matter, as occasionally the large data sets do require a bit of computational power, and you are under a time limit.

Nicely done. Interesting (but true) jab at FP towards the end. Sometimes C++ is still the best tool for the job.