[Haskell-cafe] Re: Channel9 Interview: Software Composability and theFu ture of Languages

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Thu Feb 1 06:07:51 EST 2007


neil:
> > The question is --- how would an expert describe such a process? Would a
> > professional chef give instructions in the functional or imperative
> > style?
> 
> I think a sufficiently expert chef would not even need the functional
> style. Everything would be declarative.
> 
> Dave Thomas (of "Pragmatic Programmers" fame) tells of finding his late
> grandmother's recipe cards, which she accumulated over her entire life. He
> was able to track their evolution from an extremely pedantic, imperative
> style, through to the almost Zen-like cards that read:
> 
> "Spice cake: like chocolate cake. No chocolate, add spice".

Surely this is the arrow or monad transformer of recipe abstractions!
Entirely new functionality, and such information density, on a single line.

-- Don


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