siodine

In light of the following comment by jim, I think we do disagree:

Please be careful about exposing programmers to ideology; it frequently turns into politics kills their minds. This piece in particular is a well-known mindkiller, and I have personally witnessed great minds acting very stupid because of it. The functional/imperative distinction is not a real one, and even if it were, it's less important to provability than languages' complexity, the quality of their type systems and the amount of stupid lurking in their dark corners.

And while I would nor... (read more)

Functional programming isn't an idiomatic approach to container manipulation, it's a paradigm that avoids mutable state and data. Write a GUI in Haskell using pure functions to see how different the functional approach is and what it is at its core. Or just compare a typical textbook on imperative algorithms with one on functional algorithms. Container manipulation with functions is just an idiom.

And sure you can write functional code in C++, for example (which by the way has map, filter, fold, and so on), but you can also write OO code in C. But few peop... (read more)

Laziness can muddy the waters, but it's also optional in functional programming. People using haskell in a practical setting usually avoid it and are coming up with new language extensions to make strict evaluation the default (like in records for example).

What you're really saying is the causal link between assembly and the language is less obvious, which is certainly true as it is a very high level language. However, if we're talking about the causality of the language itself, then functional languages enforce a more transparent causal structure of the ... (read more)

Why do you use diigo and pocket? They do the same thing. Also, with evernote's clearly you can highlight articles.

You weren't asking me, but I use diigo to manage links to online textbooks and tutorials, shopping items, book recommendations (through amazon), and my less important online article to read list. Evernote for saving all of my important read content (and I tag everything). Amazon's send to kindle extension to read longer articles (every once and a while I'll save all my clippings from my kindle to evernote). And then I maintain a personal wiki ... (read more)

He's stating that it will invoke arguments and distract from the thrust of the point - and guess what, he's right. Look at what you're doing, right here.

No. "It" didn't invoke this thread, jimrandomh's fatuous comment combined with it being at the top of the comment section did (I don't care that it was a criticism of functional programming). You keep failing to understand the situation and what I'm saying, and because of this I've concluded that you're a waste of my time and so I won't be responding to you further.

There are two major branches of programming: Functional and Imperative. Unfortunately, most programmers only learn imperative programming languages (like C++ or python). I say unfortunately, because these languages achieve all their power through what programmers call "side effects". The major downside for us is that this means they can't be efficiently machine checked for safety or correctness. The first self-modifying AIs will hopefully be written in functional programming languages, so learn something useful like Haskell or Scheme.

Comes fro... (read more)

No. Jimrandomh just says functional programming, imperative programming, ect are "ideologies" (importing the negative connotation). Just says it kills minds. Just says it's a well-known mindkiller. Just says it's not a real distinction. Just puts it in a dichotomy between being more or less important than "languages' complexity, the quality of their type systems and the amount of stupid lurking in their dark corners." What Louie says is more reasonable given that it's a fairly standard position within academia and because it's a small part of a larger post. (I'd rather Louie had sourced what he said, though.)

the entire point of functional programming is to hide the causality of the program from the human

Why? I would say it's the opposite (and really the causality being clear and obvious is just a corollary of referential transparency). The difficulty of reasoning about concurrent/parallel code in an imperative language, for example, is one of the largest selling points of functional programming languages like erlang and haskell.

I don't think you understand functional programming. What background are you coming from?

From SEP:

Judith Thomson provided one of the most striking and effective thought experiments in the moral realm (see Thomson, 1971). Her example is aimed at a popular anti-abortion argument that goes something like this: The foetus is an innocent person with a right to life. Abortion results in the death of a foetus. Therefore, abortion is morally wrong. In her thought experiment we are asked to imagine a famous violinist falling into a coma. The society of music lovers determines from medical records that you and you alone can save the violinist's life b

I prefer to think of 'abstract' as 'not spatially extended or localized.'

I prefer to think of it as anything existing at least partly in mind, and then we can say we have an abstraction of an abstraction or that something something is more abstract (something from category theory being a pure abstraction, while something like the category "dog" being less abstract because it connects with a pattern of atoms in reality). By their nature, abstractions are also universals, but things that actually exist like the bee hive in front of me aren't par... (read more)

For you, if I'm understanding you right, they're professions, institutions, social groups, population-wide behaviors. Sociology is generally considered more abstract or high-level than psychology.

You're kind of understanding me. Abstractly, bee hives produce honey. Concretely, this bee hive in front of me is producing honey. Abstractly, science is the product of professions, institutions, ect. Concretely, science is the product of people on our planet doing stuff.

I'm literally trying to not talk about abstractions or concepts but science as it actually... (read more)

I thought you were saying that the distinctions have become less blurred?

Yup, my bad. You caught me before my edit.

Do you think these would be useful fast-and-ready definitions for everyday promotion of scientific, philosophical, and mathematical literacy? Would you modify any of them?

I think you're reifying abstraction and doing so will introduce pitfalls when discussing them. Math, science, and philosophy are the abstracted output of their respective professions. If you take away science's competitive incentive structure or change its mechanism of... (read more)

I agree, but the problems remain and the arguments flourish.

I didn't say they don't overlap. I said the distinctions have become less blurred (I think because of the need for increased specialization in all intellectual endeavours as we accumulate more knowledge). I define philosophy, math, and science by their professions. That is, their university departments, their journals, their majors, their textbooks, and so on.

Hence, I think the best way to ask if "philosophy" is a worthwhile endeavour is to asked "why should we fund philosophy departments?" A better way to ask that question is "why... (read more)

Even though the wikipedia page for "meaning of life" is enormous, it boils all down to the very simple either/or statement I gave.

How do we know if something is answerable? Did a chicken just materialize 10 billion light years from Earth? We can't answer that. Is the color blue the best color? We can't answer that. We can answer questions that contact reality such that we can observe them directly or indirectly. Did a chicken just materialize in front me? No. Is the color blue the most preferred color? I don't know, but it can be well answered t... (read more)

My first thought was "every philosophical thought experiment ever" and to my surprise wikipedia says there aren't that many thought experiments in philosophy (although, they are huge topics of discussion). I think the violinist experiment is uniquely bad. The floating man experiment is another good example, but very old.