Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All programming philosophies are about state

worldofbs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 254 posts

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#111

Post by smt88 »

JenrHywy wrote: post #109
sjm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike this quote. It always comes across like it's designed to ease greedy people of their guilt for moving to the right as they earn more money. To me, being sound of mind is wanting everyone to have what you have, or at least an equal shot of getting there from wherever they had the roll of the dice of being born.

To interpret the quote charitably, I think it's more that age can come with an appreciation with the fragility of society, the recognition that it's a miracle it works at all, and a humility about how much and how rapidly a system can be changed without being destroyed.

> humility about how much and how rapidly a system can be changed without being destroyed

I guess everyone familiar with US history should find the quote to be utter bullshit, then.

The American Revolution, Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, 19th Amendment, Great Depression, WWII, and Civil Rights Act were all major upheavals in society that brought on rapid change.

A lot of people died prematurely, but a lot of lives were later extended or saved to balance that out somewhat, and the system surely didn't collapse.

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#112

Post by harry8 »

strangemonad wrote: post #59

I used to think this until I read Whitehead and Hickey and realized it’s all about time

I thought maybe you were referring to a known text or paper.

"whitehead and Hickey" search links back to this comment and only one other thing that can't be relevant.

So, WTF are you talking about that we should know it and search engines don't?

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#113

Post by pcblues »

q845712 wrote: post #4

It's been a while but I used to enjoy telling folks in the early years of their career that software engineers and anarchists have a lot in common because both view "the state" as the main cause of problems.

Love it, thanks. Subvert the dominant paradigm! But only if it's justified and well documented for future maintenance :)

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#115

Post by slaymaker1907 »

There are definitely ones that aren’t:

1. Language Oriented

2. Relational (the main thing there is largely about reversibility)

3. Procedural: Control flow is way more important here than state. Strict procedural might doesn’t allow early return since you then have a block with more than one exit.

Therefore, procedural and language oriented seem more about control flow.

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#116

Post by schoen »

xmonkee wrote: post #100
bcherny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.”

God, this is such condescending nonsense. The older I get, the more left I lean, because the more of the world you see the more you see what chaos our current ideology has wreaked upon it. The only people I see going the way this quote does are unthinking idiots who were fashionably "liberal" in their youth without understanding any political theory, and are now fashionably "conservative" with even lesser understandi…

I'm not sure if I can escape from your accusations of idiocy or of fashion-following, but I am someone who's moved further right as I've gotten older.

When I was younger I was more confident that the world and institutions could easily be remade or replaced just by reasoning about them intelligently, and I was also more confident that everyone's interests and morality roughly converged, so not very much had to be done to allow us to get along and live together in harmony. (Nonetheless, I think it's likely that you'd have considered my adolescent beliefs to already be right-wing and to be lacking a consciousness of political theory.) Now I'm more apt to think there are things that we can't redesign, things we depend on that evolved with no one designing them, and lots of immutable constraints from human nature. Also that a great deal of the harmony we experience is fragile, and we might be much worse off without it.

(For what it's worth, I would also try to avoid making generalizations about people that imply what they're supposed to believe based on their age -- or making fun of people on the basis that their beliefs are supposedly out of step with their age.)

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#117

Post by epgui »

manmal wrote: post #42
epgui wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not orthogonal. I believe one is a subset of the other, but at a minimum they overlap.

Using extremes for both, that would mean there is overlap between languages like Haskell and languages like SQL? (Edited for clarity)

Well… I’m not sure how helpful that example is, but yes you could probably find something in common between SQL and Haskell, and on the other hand, no, what I said did not mean that.

Look up Graham Hutton’s writings on relations. He has published quite a bit about this, and he knows a thing or two about functional programming.

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#118

Post by epgui »

manmal wrote: post #47
epgui wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're related, but "declarative" is a broader category that includes relations. Functions are a special case of relations (see also: prolog, datalog, sql...).

You can write declarative code in an imperative language, and you can write non-declarative code in a functional language (eg IO monad). So IMO they can’t be related. That’s assuming that „declarative“ means „describing outcomes rather than describing process“.

You can write functional code in an imperative language and you can write imperative code in a language like Haskell, but that’s irrelevant.

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#119

Post by epgui »

vc8f6vVV wrote: post #97
ARandomerDude wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/reduce

Recursion, what was the point of the link?

Your problem is that you’re trying too hard to argue and your time would be better spent trying to understand.

Re: All programming philosophies are about state

#120

Post by astrange »

sjm wrote: post #83
bcherny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.”

I really dislike this quote. It always comes across like it's designed to ease greedy people of their guilt for moving to the right as they earn more money. To me, being sound of mind is wanting everyone to have what you have, or at least an equal shot of getting there from wherever they had the roll of the dice of being born.

Well, since the quote comes from a Frenchman in 1875 I don't think we should read present day US politics into it. But I'm not sure what a républicain does believe.
Post reply on HN