[Haskell-cafe] education or experience?

[Rustom Mody]

Thanks Doug for reminding me of points that I had forgotten (and which are
new)
I will insert them into the blog
My comments inline

On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Yes... CS academics delivers less than it could/should;
> > and whatever this delivery is, its asymptotically sub-linear.
> > Some of it is to do with the not-quick-enough takeup of FP in academia,
> > though there are obviously many other factors as well.
>
> > http://blog.languager.org/2011/02/cs-education-is-fat-and-weak-1.html
> > and sequel is about this: how we are not getting over the quirks of the
> > past history of CS in present day teaching. Here too suggestions for
> > modifications/ change of emphasis are appreciated.
>
> Rusi's cogent blog post includes a list of techniques/concepts that
> the "unconverted" could profitably pick up from the FP community.
> In fact the FP community came late to some of these, just as
> programming languages at large came late to garbage collection.
>
> Lazy evaluation--at the heart of spreadsheets since the beginning.
>

Never thought of that  -- nice!


> Pattern matching--native to string processing (e.g. COMIT, SNOBOL).
>

Snobol -- yes, comit Ive heard of but dont know

  Appeared nearly in its present form in COGENT (1965).
>

Hmm google gives me different cogents/  I guess you are referring to the
Reynolds one?

Booleans as first class*--surely this is a joke. Algol 60 had them.
>

Not sure what you are saying (unless its about the footnote that Boole
treated bools as ints! This is new to me)  I was referring to the fact that
C programmers have great difficulty thinking of bools as first class for
similar reasons to why lists as first class is hard. [And python
programmers also for that matter, whose language does not have a proper
first class bool type]


>   Matlab exploits them heavily (though represented as doubles).
>

Not sure what you are referring to

Data orientation--COBOL fostered this outlook; see Michael Jackson.
>

Interesting! I wonder though whether you and I use 'data-orientation' in
the same way?
See below.


>   As long as Lisp ruled, FP lagged on data types.
>

A tendentious point: A lisper would say that since Lisp from the beginning
had a universal data-type, it need never bother to restrict types. [Note I
recollect first hearing the term data orientation from SICP]


>
> FP also deserves credit for infinite data structures (though the special
> case of stream processing dates way back).
>
> Doug McIlroy
>
> * It's amusing to note that "real" Booleans--the ones that Boole
> used--were integers. For Boole, or(a,b) = a + b - a*b.
>
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-- 
http://www.the-magus.in
http://blog.languager.org
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