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As a mathematician I'll certainly endorse a number of the points in the linked post. Because what they mean is that it can be very quick to translate mathemati
by Sniffnoy 12y ago
As a mathematician I'll certainly endorse a number of the points in the linked post. Because what they mean is that it can be very quick to translate mathematics into code. Maybe it won't run fast or be understandable by anyone else, but I can express complicated ideas (relatively) compactly and quickly and get something working without huge amounts of tedium.
- j2kun 12y agoCan you give me some examples? What do you use Haskell to do? I am also a mathematician so I can handle the jargon.
- Sniffnoy 12y agoMostly not large things. (Or at least, mostly not things that are large in Haskell.) An example recently -- I wanted to consider, let's say you have two finite rooted trees, S and T, with T having more vertices; and you you have a bijection f from the set of subtrees of S (subtrees have to have the same root as the original) to the set of subtrees of T, with certain restrictions on it; and then to f you associate a system of linear equations; and if the solution set to this system isn't contained a hyperplane aligned with the axes, then (if there exists an f for which this is true) I'll say "S interferes with T". And then I want to check for various T whether there is any smaller S that interferes with them. Basically without something like Haskell, or at least something like Haskell-or-ML (I didn't need typeclasses and I don't know how much I needed laziness), it seems like that would have been a complete mess. Of course, the above example is perhaps not the best as it meant I had to [either look up a library, or, what I actually did] implement row-reduction in Haskell, obviously not a great language for it! But ultimately it wasn't too terrible. And the rest as I've said would have been terrible in another language.