On Sat, Aug 19, 2017 at 2:15 PM, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Indeed. People find imperative (recipe) algorithms easy to follow, and pure > functional reasoning hard. I'm glad that functional programming is fashionable > again, and hope that people will learn good habits from it, but I think that > mathematical purity is not necessary or even helpful in the majority of > programming tasks. > > I expect that languages like Haskell, like Scheme and Lisp, will be greatly > influential but remain niche languages themselves.
Agreed. Functional programming languages teach us about recursion, immutability, declarative programming styles, etc, all of which are incredibly useful. I don't particularly enjoy writing Scheme code (only ever done it because of Lilypond), but I think I'm a better programmer for having gotten my head around it. > > [1] Assuming that mathematics actually is sound, which thanks to Gödel we know > is unprovable. Harmony in audio signals is based on frequency ratios. Therefore sound is mathematics, and by the reflexive principle of equality, mathematics is sound. Sorry, Gödel, I just proved it. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
