From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,f3bebae566a54cab X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!d1g2000yqm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Phil Clayton Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Some exciting new trends in concurrency and software design Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 05:14:03 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <3a7bcec1-5dc9-466b-b97e-39f7ccd49970@d1g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> References: <8a5765ba-622a-42cd-9886-28ed7cfed31e@s17g2000yqs.googlegroups.com> <4dff5be5$0$6565$9b4e6d93@newsspool3.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 2.24.17.218 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1308659357 5221 127.0.0.1 (21 Jun 2011 12:29:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:29:17 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: d1g2000yqm.googlegroups.com; posting-host=2.24.17.218; posting-account=v7gx3AoAAABfjb9m5b7l_Lt2KVEgQBIe User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-Google-Web-Client: true X-Google-Header-Order: HUALESNKRC X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:19983 Date: 2011-06-21T05:14:03-07:00 List-Id: On Jun 20, 3:40=A0pm, Georg Bauhaus 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. =A0Instead, you just > "sign" days of work with a few nice lines of code. =A0That's quite > typical of FP, I think, but just less feasible in "imperative" > languages. =A0We 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