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If you're familiar with a recipe for baking a cake, the barrier to entry for most imperative languages is small. If you're familiar with Lambda calculus, I imag
by taneq 6y ago
If you're familiar with a recipe for baking a cake, the barrier to entry for most imperative languages is small. If you're familiar with Lambda calculus, I imagine the barrier to entry for Haskell is similar.
In both cases, entry is the easy bit. Learning the notation is a somewhat orthogonal and arguably much smaller impediment than the inescapable difficulty of figuring out what you're trying to accomplish, and then how to accomplish it.
- Macha 6y agoThere is a tendency among the more academic of CS researchers, of spending so much time in academia to assume that because they find math notation so simple from their experience using it that this means it is clearly superior to the notation actual programmers use in actual programming languages and treat that like some aberration from industry. Personally I've always found math notation feels like it was optimised for space efficiency and writing speed on paper, akin to legal shorthand rather than the beauty I'm always told it has. Similarly for attempts to bring programming syntax closer to math syntax. In college I found myself translating equations of medium complexity such as the Fourier transform into pseudocode to understand. Obviously however, my familiarity with programming notation colours my perspective as much as their experience with math notation colours theirs