Re: [Haskell-cafe] Clearly, Haskell is ill-founded

On 7/9/07, Dan Piponi wrote:

On 7/8/07, Thomas Conway wrote:

...

The basic claim appears to be that discrete mathematics is a bad foundation for computer science. I suspect the subscribers to this list would beg to disagree.

Wearing my tin foil hat for the moment, I think that there is a conspiracy by some computer scientists to drive a wedge between mathematicians and computer scientists. You can see hints of it in many places where both mathematicians and computer scientists hang out and there have been quite a few recent articles setting up mathematics and computer science as somehow in competition with each other.

Many of the structures studied by mathematicians are algebraic. Many of the structures studied by computer scientists are coalgebraic (eg. the web itself can be seen as a vast coalgebraic structure).

Okay Mr. Piponi, as a math geek I can't let that comment about the web slide without further explanation. Is it just the idea that coalgebras can capture the idea of side affects (a -> F a) or is there something more specific that you're thinking of?