In any case, I failed to extol other (non-obvious) virtues of the quicksort example. A lazy quicksort can be used...
The skeptic will in turn point to the C++ standard library routines: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/partial_sort.html http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/nth_element.html
Again, the overall point is that some of the "slower" elements of FC++ can offer you trade-offs: choices you wouldn't otherwise have. Lists and lazy evaluation may not always be the best choice for performance- critical portions of applications, but for other cases they can often yield novel and/or simpler designs.
I think it's too much to ask Brian to defend functional programming as a whole. Some people will use fc++, and some won't -- I don't see how this differs from regex, spirit, etc. Ten years ago if you spoke of generic programming you might get a funny look from people, and "what do I need that for?". That's the reaction I'm sensing about functional programming by some reviewers. I hope that the review manager ignores that reaction, and makes their decision based upon the library itself. Dave