>But when people wanted to think clearly, they invented math,

No, they didn't. They invented a syntax two milleniums ago, optimized for use-cases of those ages, using alphabets of those times. Thinking in greek symbols is not helping anyone think clearly. It's just more confusion, because now suddenly, i can't type or phrase a relevant question out loud, until i get a greek keyboard and learn the proper pronounciations of the greek alphabet.

The notion we should just stick to a notation and conventions optimized for a different era, a different culture, a different alphabet and a different writing tool (paper), is ridiculous. Do NASA scientists calculate speed using knots? Or power using horse power? They do not.

Math is to computer science, what classical music is to pop music. A historical relic that stopped having economic and cultural value beyond being a mere status symbol.

>of which FP is nearly the computational manifestation.

No, it's not. One could argue the same thing for logic programming. Computation is not the manifestation of math. It's a strategy to answer a mathametical question. The original strategy was to just 'try things and explore' and when you found (guessed?) the answer, you would prove it to be sure.

Functional programming, in the religious Haskell sense, is just a term rewriter. That's not the manifestation of computation. It's just one way to specify a strategy. In the case of Haskell, which is a term rewriter with a bible full of fine print and exceptions, a very sado-machistic one.

>But computers are primarily about information, and we think about information in terms of relationships

No, that would be Prolog. A different default strategy. Less fine print, but not the cure-all either.

>That's exactly what FP is about: expressing computation in terms of relationships.

Nope. A relationship doesn't have a computational direction. In math, all these statements express the same relationship:

    double( x ) / x = x
    double( x ) = x * x
    x * x = double( x )

In Haskell, only one of them happens to be legal. Because you are not writing a mathematical equation. You are specifying a computation. The fact that isn't even obvious, makes matters worse.

> But computers are primarily about information, and we think about information in terms of relationships

Yes, and the biggest challenge, the pain everyone tries to lessen, is managing the coordination and standardisation of changes (mutations) to that information. Wrapping every computation with the same type of state-monad actually helps a lot with this, and has been the most popular strategy to deal with this problem in the last 20 years.

user:	rm82
created:	December 26, 2013
karma:	-1