Xah Lee wrote: > This i'm not sure. Of the past couple of years i increasingly developed > a theory (probably well-known among proper experts), that the > difficulty of human feats of various forms, are primarily a perception > and familiarity thing. This may be getting off topic, but i wrote an > essay expresising much of the idea using Juggling as a example: > Difficulty Perceptions in Human Feats > http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/juggling.html > > likewise, i think this applies to mental feats as well. In particular, > i think that whether imperative code or functional code is easier for > the mind is almost ENTIRELY dependent on which one the person is more > familiar with, coulped with a innate attitude one may have picked up.
But most of us start learning programming with imperative language, I started with COBOL and Pascal(are they still taught). Then we would hit the problem of looping one way or another pretty soon. Without a doubt, some experienced programmer would tell you to use for loop or search for one. This is even true in two heavily used declarative tools, SQL and Excel. If there is foldl/scanl/map in SQL, I think it would be much easier to code. Likewise for Excel, it is very functional(like its ancestors 1-2-3) then VBA was thrown in. In fact, I think haskell should be taught in any CS course as it opens up a completely different way of approaching problem and it is easier to read than LISP. > oh Haskell, my love! I am really going to learn it now. (maybe i'll > start A-Java-Haskell-A-Day) This month i just learned and read about > how Perl 6 is implemented in Haskell! (because one Taiwaness hacker > single-handedly by happenstance tried to do it, as a by-product of > learning Haskell) This Pugs (Perl6 in Haskell) really brought two > rather incompatible communities together somewhat for mutual exchange. > (the learning, on the surface, is politely said to be mutual, but i'm > pretty sure it's mostly Perlers learning from the Haskell folks) After seeing Haskell, I don't think I would go back to Perl(which I like better than python but python has the momentum as a general purpose language). That is why I am doing the think in haskell, code in python, whenever possible. > > ... there is a sentiment among the elite tech-geeking morons, early on > imbued by the concept of troll, so that they in general don't > communicate and learn from any other language except their own. > Anything cross-posted is considered as troll, and the inter-language > communication has been essentially completely cut off. Basically, the > only ones generating all the garbage posts are these troll-criers > themselves. (will have to flesh out on this particular point of > net-sociology in a essay some other day.) > May be you can tone down a bit if you want a constructive discussion. I am too old to have feelings about opinionated posts(and insensitive to) so I can go through the technical stuff. Confucius said "I can always learn something whenever there is 3 people getting together", lousy translation :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
