[Haskell-cafe] I read somewhere that for 90% of a wide class of computing problems, you only need 10% of the source code in Haskell, that you would in an imperative language.

[Eugene Kirpichov]

2009/10/1 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:
> Eugene Kirpichov wrote:
>>
>> 2009/10/1 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:
>>
>>>
>>> Sure. But what is a computer program? It's a *list of instructions* that
>>> tells a computer *how to do something*. And yet, the Haskell definition
>>> of
>>> sum looks more like a definition of what a sum is rather than an actual,
>>> usable procedure for *computing* that sum. (Of course, we know that it
>>> /is/
>>> in fact executable... it just doesn't look it at first sight.)
>>>
>>
>> Well, we are not writing computer programs directly, even in C, that's
>> what compilers are for.
>> That's why I find arguments about the sequential essence of computer
>> programs to be weak.
>>
>
> It might be a better argument to say that human thinking is fundamentally
> sequential; parallel computers have been around for a little while now...
>

I don't buy this argument, either; human thinking is far too broad a
concept to say that it is simply "sequential". If it were sequential,
it could barely express non-sequential concepts, and natural languages
would have rather few of them, which we all know is false.

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-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Web IR developer, market.yandex.ru