1 Feb
2007
1 Feb
'07
6:07 a.m.
neil:
The question is --- how would an expert describe such a process? Would a professional chef give instructions in the functional or imperative style?
I think a sufficiently expert chef would not even need the functional style. Everything would be declarative.
Dave Thomas (of "Pragmatic Programmers" fame) tells of finding his late grandmother's recipe cards, which she accumulated over her entire life. He was able to track their evolution from an extremely pedantic, imperative style, through to the almost Zen-like cards that read:
"Spice cake: like chocolate cake. No chocolate, add spice".
Surely this is the arrow or monad transformer of recipe abstractions! Entirely new functionality, and such information density, on a single line. -- Don