Agreed. The post wasn't meant to suggest anybody should go and optimize! Just that simple looking code can be tricky/interesting.

Also, even artificially skewing the pivot in quicksort as suggested in the paper you reference doesn't work except on /very/ long pipeline machines, because it worsens cache performance & increases instruction count. Also, even then, it's expensive to randomly sample to generate a skewed pivot (a cost they negelect in that paper, assuming it is free)