3 ms·
Ironically, though, FP is perhaps the worst programming paradigm for actually performing numerical computations.
by xaa 14y ago
Ironically, though, FP is perhaps the worst programming paradigm for actually performing numerical computations.
- jrajav 14y agoMathematica borrows heavily from FP and is well known for its computational performance. And yes, a lot of its guts are imperative, but most of the internal libraries that encapsulate the actual mathematical concepts are written in Mathematica itself.
- jbooth 14y agoThose guts that 'actually perform numerical calculations' as referenced by the above post are not only imperative, they're in Fortran, the language of Real Programmers. Many packages have successfully used FP as a layer over those calculations, but that doesn't invalidate the original point you're replying to. Calling functions to add numbers is in fact that worst possible paradigm for performing the actual numerics.
- sixbrx 14y agoMath is a lot more than numerical computations, however. If you're modeling abstractions like vector spaces (as real mathematicians often will want to do), then functional languages are an excellent choice.