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Yes.

(or possibly no - in this particular case, there is truly no reason to care)

I'm pretty sure that Nil programming language would roundly spank even C++ - much less Java or Go - on any of the metrics considered; especially memory usage and execution time!

If you're looking for a programming language that solves all your coding problems look no further. Now that I have abandoned Java my manually linking programs with xml skills have declined sharply. Similarly after abandoning Lisp my ability to match parenthesis's has almost vanished. No matter, with Go I perceive the universe in my belly button.

There is still place to ascend further, my friend. May I introduce you to the ultimate pinnacle of programming language design: the Nil programming language.

There, fixed it for you. Why do we need to specify language when talking about about bad coding practices. From COBOL to .net I've seen my share of crash and burn applications and in almost every instance (including my own abends) it was not the "crappy" language, but the creator.

Why, I dare you to write a crashing application in the Nil programming language!

Sounds like an imperative programmer talking: you 'use' the sort. As if it is a certain step in a program, instead of something that can be interleaved with other calculations.

You're very wrong. An imperative programmer "invokes" or "runs" the sort. A functional programmer "uses" its result in another computation. The latter is entirely consistent with FP paradigm.

On a side note, if you're doing a sort but not using its output - regardless of lazyness/eagerness of the language - then why you're doing it in the first place? In pure FP language such as Haskell it's even more visible, since you essentially forcibly ignore the result of a function you call, and there are no side-effects - so you very clearly tell the compiler to "do nothing". And why would you explicitly write "do nothing" in your program (unless you're coding in Nil)? But it is exactly what the Shootout guys did.

As a related anecdote, the IOCCC guys have once got a technical winner - the shortest C program possible that produced itself as its output. It was a blank .c file (and a makefile that just renamed and chmod+x it so it becomes a do-nothing binary). It was a valid entry by the existing rules... but it forced the rule change afterwards, and for a good reason.

Hate to break it to you, but that's a possibility in any language.

That's why I only use nil, though I switch to SARTRE or Whitespace in my more philosophical moods. Anyway, you're missing out, I heard there's a bunch of code in the Bible or something.