2 ms·

I don't want to be dismissive of set theory, because it has an extremely rich History and is still seen by most as the foundation of maths, but I believe there

by epgui 3y ago

I don't want to be dismissive of set theory, because it has an extremely rich History and is still seen by most as the foundation of maths, but I believe there are some fundamental issues with it that make type theory a more appropriate foundational choice for general computation and programming language theory/design. There's a reason theorem assistants and proof languages are based on some version of type theory, rather than set theory. To a first approximation, type theory and set theory play similar roles. There has been a lot of noise in recent years around replacing set theory with type theory as the foundation of maths, at least in the context of proof assistants and programming language theory. But nonetheless, I agree that knowledge of set theory can't hurt (and practically speaking, you can't go far in your maths journey without it). (I would also note that functional programming is a special case of relational programming.)

yowlingcat 3y ago
But when is the average engineer going to need to deeply understand functional programming vs needing to deeply understand SQL? The latter governs how your data is stored and mutated at rest while the former, while an influential flavor of programming, is ultimately not the model that won out in the market (and for good reasons IMO). Most of the volume of useful work to be done in programming is about state manipulation, which is mostly relational database operations, which is mostly about set theory. I think every engineer should learn foundations that best equip them for the market long term, and prioritize their order of attack along those investments which will earn them outsized value. Data structures and algorithms, set theory and distributed systems equip an engineer extremely well for that. I have a very hard time believing deep investments in functional programming and type theory would differentially pay off better. Now, if one's goal is not to optimize for the market, then I think the answer is a lot more broad.

by epgui 3y ago

yowlingcat 3y ago

But when is the average engineer going to need to deeply understand functional programming vs needing to deeply understand SQL? The latter governs how your data is stored and mutated at rest while the former, while an influential flavor of programming, is ultimately not the model that won out in the market (and for good reasons IMO). Most of the volume of useful work to be done in programming is about state manipulation, which is mostly relational database operations, which is mostly about set theory. I think every engineer should learn foundations that best equip them for the market long term, and prioritize their order of attack along those investments which will earn them outsized value. Data structures and algorithms, set theory and distributed systems equip an engineer extremely well for that. I have a very hard time believing deep investments in functional programming and type theory would differentially pay off better. Now, if one's goal is not to optimize for the market, then I think the answer is a lot more broad.