3 ms·

oh I don't think that's fair. the view that mathsy things are discovered not invented is hugely widespread amongst many people who know what they're talking abo

by ferzul 7y ago

oh I don't think that's fair. the view that mathsy things are discovered not invented is hugely widespread amongst many people who know what they're talking about. I don't know what I'm talking about, and I think such matters are invented not discovered. but I do think Haskell is a great language that will drastically improve the quality of maybe even any project that doesn't need c-like efficiency. these concepts are independent.

pron 7y ago
Creating a formal system, an artificial language, is not a mathematical discovery and it has nothing to do with "math things." There are interesting "math things" one can discover about Python, but no one would take you seriously if you say Python was discovered rather than invented, and no one who knows the history of logic would take seriously any claim that the lambda calculus was discovered. The person who invented the lambda calculus said it was invented in the very paper he presented it, so no, the people who say it was discovered do not know what they're talking about, at least not on that matter.
- willtim 7y ago
  Lambda calculus is a lot simpler than Python. It bares a striking similarity to Gentzens natural deduction rules and is essentially isomorphic to it. It is also very well studied and its properties are well known. Hence it makes an excellent basis for a programming language. The idea that Lambda calculus was discovered and not invented was recently entertained by Phil Wadler. Given his academic credentials, I think we can assume he knows what he is talking about.
  - pron 7y ago
    Why can we assume that? Is he an expert on the history of logic? That he's an expert in an adjacent field doesn't make him at all an expert on that. If you listen to his talks and compare with the actual texts he mentions you'll see that he's wrong. And the similarity is not "striking" at all. It's by design. It is only striking if you don't know the actual history of how these formal systems developed. A couple of years ago I composed an entire anthology on the subject: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

by ferzul 7y ago

pron 7y ago

Creating a formal system, an artificial language, is not a mathematical discovery and it has nothing to do with "math things." There are interesting "math things" one can discover about Python, but no one would take you seriously if you say Python was discovered rather than invented, and no one who knows the history of logic would take seriously any claim that the lambda calculus was discovered. The person who invented the lambda calculus said it was invented in the very paper he presented it, so no, the people who say it was discovered do not know what they're talking about, at least not on that matter.

willtim 7y ago
Lambda calculus is a lot simpler than Python. It bares a striking similarity to Gentzens natural deduction rules and is essentially isomorphic to it. It is also very well studied and its properties are well known. Hence it makes an excellent basis for a programming language. The idea that Lambda calculus was discovered and not invented was recently entertained by Phil Wadler. Given his academic credentials, I think we can assume he knows what he is talking about.
- pron 7y ago
  Why can we assume that? Is he an expert on the history of logic? That he's an expert in an adjacent field doesn't make him at all an expert on that. If you listen to his talks and compare with the actual texts he mentions you'll see that he's wrong. And the similarity is not "striking" at all. It's by design. It is only striking if you don't know the actual history of how these formal systems developed. A couple of years ago I composed an entire anthology on the subject: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]