Functional thinking

I started reading a book "Learn You a Haskell". It is truly wonderful, explaining complex things in a simple friendly way. Haskell itself seems to be the functional language. It's pureness makes you feel writing math  lemmas and theorems in a formal language, it is a very different feeling from C++/Boo I used to program in.

Surprisingly enough, functional programming makes us care about the goal, or a shape of the result. You answer questions like "What should it look like? What does it consist of?". At the same time, imperative programming involves asking the question "How?" most of the time.

As a first milestone and a practical task in learning Haskell I wrote the Burrows-Wheeler Transformation (BWT). I never thought it could be implemented in just 10 lines (not counting qsort), and remain nicely readable after that:

qsort :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a]
qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort left ++ [x] ++ qsort right
where left = filter (<=x) xs
right = filter (>x) xs
bwt :: String -> (Int,String)
bwt input =
let buildMx [] _ = []
buildMx (x:xs) ch = (x:xs,ch) : buildMx xs x
mx = buildMx input (last input)
sorted = qsort mx
output = map snd sorted
base = head [ i | (i,(s,_))<-zip [0..] sorted, s==input ]
in (base,output)