Re: Some exciting new trends in concurrency and software design

[Phil Clayton <phil.clayton@lineone.net>]

On Jun 20, 3:40 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:
>
> 2. FP *hides* the effective work's complexity behind a mathematical
> facade: you write down a nice formula after days of thinking,
> shouting, explaining, and getting it right. Then, you do *not*
> document your "thought process" in source text.  Instead, you just
> "sign" days of work with a few nice lines of code.  That's quite
> typical of FP, I think, but just less feasible in "imperative"
> languages.  We can stare at the short FP algorithm in awe of its
> "mathematical elegance" and start wondering what the heck it is doing
> behind the scenes.

I don't believe that it is less feasible in imperative languages or
any other paradigm: put in enough effort to make insightful
observations and you can come up with succinct efficient algorithms
that are hard to understand.  Consider the following imperative
example from Carroll Morgan's book Programming from Specifications
(see last page):
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/publications/books/PfS/PfS-21.ps.gz
(Well.. it didn't exactly leap out at me!)

I would suggest that elegant and insightful programs are due to the
more academic nature of the text/author.  I do agree that such elegant
programs are more typical with FP but only because a much greater
proportion of FP text has academic roots.

There is plenty of industrial FP out there, where the emphasis is on
code being well documented and understandable, maintainable etc. by
normal people.  I suppose that is industrial elegance!

Phil