[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.

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Sure, but it doesn't mean that because someone uses an imperative way of
counting, that it means people's brains work imperatively all the way.
People tend to talk and communicate a lot in a declarative way no? For
example ask someone that doesn't know programming how he we would make a
paddleball game. I have no idea what that person would say, but I think it
would something like: "I tell the computer that the paddle should move along
with the mouse; and when the ball bounces against the paddle, the ball
reverses direction; if the paddle misses the ball, it's game over". I don't
think anybody would say: "each frame, the ball's position moves by a tiny
timestep; when the mouse is sampled, copy the mouse position to the paddle;
etc..."

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>wrote:

> Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
>
>> I really doubt people tend to think in either way. It's not even sure our
>> thinking can be modeled with computing no?
>>
>
> Well, try this: Go ask a random person how you add up a list of numbers.
> Most of them will say something about adding the first two together, adding
> the third to that total, and so forth. In other words, the step by step
> instructions. Very few of them will answer that the sum of an empty list is
> defined to be zero, and the sum of a non-empty list is defined to be the
> first number plus the sum of the list tail.
>
> Then again, few non-programmers will set anything about creating a counter
> variable and initialising it to zero either; this is a programming
> "artifact". (Humans don't think like this internally, but most programming
> languages conceptually require it.) Nobody has much difficulty with this, so
> maybe the only problem with Haskell is that everybody learns to program "the
> other way" first, before they get to Haskell...
>
>
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