[Wittrs] Re: Debating with Functional Programmers
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:56:44 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, kirby urner <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
(Well, never mind what Kirby wrote, since I am not actually quoting any
of it).
I'm not sure what this thread is about, or even if it is about
anything. So I'll take a little liberty with my response.
I'm not sure what it is about fads, and why they manage to have such
influence. But some do. People apparently allow them to become
ideologies, and allow those ideologies to prevail over ordinary common
sense. Or maybe my mistake is in thinking that common sense is
ordinary.
I'm also not sure what it is about America, but it seems that we are
far more prone to fads than most other places in the world.
I am old enough to have gone through school before the "new math" fad
pretty much destroyed the teaching of mathematics in the schools. But
even there we see how it has done far more damage in USA than in most
other parts of the world. Now don't get me wrong. I really do love
the Bourbaki style of doing mathematics. There's a sort of beauty and
elegance about it. But it seems to me that this is a beauty that can
only reveal itself to those who are already mathematicians. So we
should teach mathematics, not mathematical elegance, in the schools,
and allow those graduates who become mathematicians to enjoy the beauty
of the Bourbaki style for themselves and without us force-feeding them.
I look around at the field of linguistics, and see how the fad of
chomskyan think dominated that field for such a long time. And then I
wonder at how the fad of young earth creationism (largely a 20th
century invention) managed to take over so much of protestant
Christianity.
And then, of course, there is America itself, where the absurd fad of
"supply side economics" has damn near bankrupted the nation, yet the
fad still has such a strong hold that those who know better find their
every attempt to repair the situation being blocked by the adherents of
the fad.
So, yes, OO (object oriented programming) was a big fad in computer
science, and has played far too dominant a role over the last decade.
And then we come to functional programming. The functional programming
fad is actually older than the OO fad. It never took hold. It
probably never will take hold, though I suppose I could be wrong about
that.
If I compare OO with functional programming, there are two significant
differences. (1) OO actually works, at least after a fashion, while I
doubt that functional programming can ever work satisfactorily. (2)
functional programming requires an IQ well above that of the average
college grad, in order to even grasp what it is trying to do. OO
doesn't require much more intelligence than is needed by a busboy at a
restaurant, so it is far easier to sell OO than to sell functional
programming.
Addendum: It seems to me that Kirby Urner has been trying to push his
own faddish way of doing mathematics. I seem to recall arguing with
him about his ideas on the sci.math usenet group (several years ago).
Fortunately, Kirby's fad doesn't seem to be taking hold in the way that
Chomsky's took hold in linguistics.
Addendum 2: Isn't philosophy itself largely a system of fads? I guess
part of what I like about the later Wittgenstein, is that he seemed to
be breaking away from the fads that had obsessed him in his earlier
years.
Regards,
Neil
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