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Funnily, there's haskell-cafe thread[0], a github issue, and even a paper, about this (and I think maybe reddit got involved too).

Anyhow, the title is kind of too much. At least, given the aforementioned discussions, we're conflicted liars.

[0]https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2015-April/1... [2]http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf [3] https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/pull/8

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Doug McIlroy emailed me afterward to say that he's never heard of its being derided as not a real sieve. Certainly, no-one of his generation would do so, I imagine. But as the article proves, younger folks are more playful.

In Doug's email he also pointed me to this little nugget he wrote:

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sieve/

The late Dennis Ritchie 'wrote the first coroutine sieve' using Unix pipes!

What a wonderful reminder of the power of Unix compositionality, which is at the heart of the laziness experiment known as Haskell.

I don't get it. I simply see the example as an elegant way of introducing the power of the language. This kind of pedantry only drives curious people away.

Most people know it's not a real sieve of Eratosthenes and just a demonstration of Haskell concepts but there will always be people excited to educate others regardless of the context.

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