On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 6:54 PM, OWP
<owpmailact@gmail.com> wrote:
This thought isn't really related to Haskell specifically but it's more towards FP ideal in general.
I'm new to the FP world and to get me started, I began reading a few papers. One paper is by John Backus called "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and It's Algebra of Programs".
While I like the premise which notes the limitation of the von Neumann Architecture, his solution to this problem makes me feel queasy when I read it.
For me personally, one thing I enjoy about a typical procedural program is that it allows me to "Brute Force Learn". This means I stare at a particular section of the code for a while until I figure out what it does. I may not know the reasoning behind it but I can have a pretty decent idea of what it does. If I'm lucky, later on someone may tell me "oh, that just did a gradient of such and such matrix". In a way, I feel happy I learned something highly complex without knowing I learned something highly complex.
Backus seems to throw that out the window. He introduces major new terms which require me to break out the math book which then requires me to break out a few other books to figure out which bases things using archaic symbols which then requires me to break out the pen and paper to mentally expand what in the world that does. It makes me feel CISCish except without a definition book nearby. It's nice if I already knew what a "gradient of such and such matrix" is but what happens if I don't?
For the most part, I like the idea that I have the option of Brute Force Learning my way towards something. I also like the declarative aspect of languages such as SQL which let's me asks the computer of things once I know the meaning of what I'm asking. I like the ability to play and learn but I also like the ability to declare this or that once I do learn. From Backus paper, if his world comes to a reality, it seems like I should know what I'm doing before I even start. The ability to learn while coding seems to have disappeared. In a way, if the von Neumann bottleneck wasn't there, I'm not sure programming would be as popular as it is today.
Unfortunately, I'm still very new and quite ignorant about Haskell so I do not know how much of Backus is incorporated in Haskell but so far, in the start of my FP learning adventure, this is how things seem to be seen.
If I may generously ask, where am I wrong and where am I right with this thought?
Thank you for any explanation
P.S. If anyone knows of a better place I can ask this question, please feel free to show me the way.