helicase comments on Terminal Values and Instrumental Values - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 November 2007 07:56AM

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Comment author: helicase 02 October 2014 01:28:54PM *  1 point [-]

This actually seems to be explicitly represented in (Mandarin) Chinese:
"须要" cannot be used with nouns, and prescribes that something should be done in a certain way (instrumental values)
"需要" is mostly for nouns, and indicates that you need it/should have it (terminal values)

Or, the difference between these two programming paradigms:
* Imperative languages specify how you want the computer to do something (sometimes down to the machine code level)
* Functional languages specify what kind of result you want (add these two sets of numbers together, I don't care how, multithread if appropriate)