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I need to go home and eat a bunch of weed edibles so I can read this comment.

• oneepic 7y ago
  Update: So I got drunk instead (which has basically the same effect on me). Programming is math, except in the real world you have to deal with countless technical and business constraints. So unsurprisingly, theory != practice. The substance might just change in practice because a theoretical answer is completely impractical. A formal language? Mathematics is a language of hand-waving. And I say that as a person who _loves_ math, even though I didn't take math beyond calc in college. When you translate math into algorithms and real programs, you begin running into problems that shape your solution. Really, you could come up with infinite different solutions to the same problem, all with different characteristics, use cases, strengths and weaknesses. There's no point in making a shared library, because it would be too fucking big and confusing. Better to formulate a solution yourself at this point, if you know what you're looking for, and tune it as you go. I expect little to no cross-pollination because mathematicians love math and love their own work and love not having to deal with implementation issues, and have no desire to learn anything you mentioned. Unit testing, refactoring, ...none of it. Even many CS profs don't care, it's just the way it is -- a love of powerful ideas, not so much the dirty work of making them a reality. They theorize, and write off everything else as "applications." Nobody wants to write a beautiful algorithm, that also has to handle the sizes of different data types, and consider that not all the data may be in memory, and so on.