Decoupled fizzbuzz (#262)

Cogniscent of the baggage associated with this timeless kids-game-turned-into-interview-ques­tion, sparing its hiring efficacy and undeniable tedium when im­ple­ment­ed again and again in yet another C imitation, I believe that the lack of its demise is in parts due to it being just shy of trivial with regards to all three pillars of imperative com­put­ing (control flow, i/o and data).
Contrasting a functional pearl — which is a dazzling S-Expression found out there in con­cep­tu­al cosmos —, I want to describe fizzbuzz as an imperative nut: ef­fort­less­ly consumable when bought already cracked and put into a bag on a store shelf, yet unexpectedly hard to crack into two clean halves by oneself. I feel its im­ple­men­ta­tion often beckoning me, enticing me with forthcoming elegance, on­ly to turn around and show its ugly face of cumbersomely construed i/o calls and disconcertingly intertwined execution paths.

Following an over-engineered approach in Haskell utilizing overlapping instances to not discriminate against index or periodicity (decoupled-fizzbuzz_overlapping-instances.hs), I chose to try the oth­er extreme of thinking about both streams of different origins and on­ly splicing them appropriately (decoupled-fizzbuzz_decoupled.hs). To further decrease apparent coupling, I finally hid the branching away inside a sort (decoupled-fizzbuzz_decoupled-ifless.hs):

main = mapM_ putStrLn . take 100
    $ zipWith3 (\n s z -> head . reverse . sort $ [show n, s ++ z])
               [1..] (cycle ["","","fizz"]) (cycle ["","","","","buzz"])

Fascinatingly, the often seen approach of leeching periodicity of off the indices’ arithmetic properties has vanished completely to the point of having two mutually oblivious data streams being merged based on their intrinsic willingness to provide non-empty data.

Thus born was the basis for a vim im­ple­men­ta­tion of fizzbuzz. Not a vimscript im­ple­men­ta­tion — which would presumably not bring any­thing new to the table — but in non-branching, linearily typed vim keystrokes (decoupled-fizzbuzz_decoupled.vim):

i1<Esc> qiyyp<C-A>q98@i
qfkAfizz<Esc>kkq32@f qb4jAbuzz<Esc>jq19@b
:%s/^\d*\ze[fb]<Enter>

It is not yet clear to me how to transform arbitrary branching decisions into decoupled blind text manipulation tasks, where every branch has somehow become an effect of a textual arbiter introduced for a niche action. However, I currently entertain hopes of coaxing vim-y edits into a scripting lan­guage more attuned to ed­it­ing tasks and with less translational friction than traditional tools including regexp+ and fully-fledged Turing com­plete programs can offer. The Kolmogorov problem of fizzbuzz is in my view a convincing demonstration of the presence of untapped potential in this domain.