3 ms·
It should be obvious that if a transformation is syntactically trivial, it can only solve trivial problems. If programming is not-math, it's not going to become
by Veedrac 9y ago
It should be obvious that if a transformation is syntactically trivial, it can only solve trivial problems. If programming is not-math, it's not going to become math just because you change the surface syntax.
A mathematician's definition of a sorted list is different to a programmer's at least in part because a mathematician is interested in a sorted list and a programmer is interested in sorting a list. This difference is intrinsically invariant of the programming paradigm (though not of the context).
This issue isn't so much that this post didn't convince me that there is an underlying, semantically relevant sense in which the APL approach is more mathematical, but that it didn't even seem to notice that this was a thing that needed to be argued.
- avmich 9y ago> If programming is not-math Programming is _always_ math; was it Dijkstra who said "programming is one of the hardest branches of applied mathematics"? It's also engineering - as in "engineers have to do some math occasionally, even if they don't realize that". I often ask on the interviews to produce an expression returning sorted 3-element list using some simple primitives. I've found that with chosen primitives you still can model different approaches - and even though in all cases the result is an expression ("sorted list is..."), the structure of that expression can model imperative style ("first do this, then this...")
- Veedrac 9y agoOn one hand, yes. On the other, classifying whether programming is a math or not doesn't help you decide whether you should use APL, or much else for that matter.