71–80 of 146 posts
It seems that the fundamental problem with the functional paradigm (in its pure form) is that the real world - including the architecture of the computer that is used to run the programs on - is full of side effects, i.e. is essentially "imperative," and with this impedance between them the idea creates more problems than it solves.
It seems that the fundamental problem with the functional paradigm (in its pure form) is that the real world - including the architecture of the computer that is used to run the programs on - is full of side effects, i.e. is essentially "imperative," and with this impedance between them the idea creates more problems than it solves.
on the choice of language to teach the course why sml i think there are a lot of nicer choice OCaml , its basically sml only more popular and used more in real life Haskell , again more popular , and used more in real life Idris , newer and said to be more progressive F# , a more practical choice and similar to sml a lisp , well if you want to focus on the functional part and less on the types part
Slightly off-topic but what's a good forum to seek help on FP practices outside of the courses like this online? Every winter break I get back into trying to learn more FP (in Haskell) and in the past several years I have been practicing algo problems (codeforces, advent of code, leetcode). I always get stuck on more advanced graph algorithms where you traverse a and modify a graph, not a tree structure - it gets par…
That said, as a beginner in functional programming, it would probably be good enough if you just focus on directly translating imperative graph algorithms to functional programming. You simply solve the problem by programming at a slightly lower level of abstraction.
[0]: https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N46678 or preprint at https://github.com/snowleopard/alga-paper/releases/download/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a few things which go into this (hi, I'm the instructor!). One such reason is historical. Standard ML is a research language, and a significant amount of work on it was done by professors at Carnegie Mellon, who developed the curriculum for this course. Even setting that aside though, I fully agree with the choice to teach it in SML. For transparency, I work professionally in OCaml, so I am not unfamiliar wit…
As a professional who uses F# every day, I appreciate this answer, even though it concerns me. Separating concepts from practical details is worthwhile, but can be taken too far. I think the FP community probably focuses a bit too much on theory. I would encourage you to consider teaching a more practical language, like F#, in the future.
It seems that the fundamental problem with the functional paradigm (in its pure form) is that the real world - including the architecture of the computer that is used to run the programs on - is full of side effects, i.e. is essentially "imperative," and with this impedance between them the idea creates more problems than it solves.
on the contrary, i think FP (Haskell at least) gives you more & better tools to represent and wrangle side effects
Great resource! Forgive my ignorance but why do so many modern functional programming courses use Standard ML instead of a Lisp dialect? Is it because of its built-in type-checking, or is it just how it's always been taught?
Why would they use a Lisp dialect instead of Standard ML? It looks ugly, it looks different from math, and different concepts have the same syntax. Standard ML looks nice, it looks like math, and different concepts have different syntax.
on the choice of language to teach the course why sml i think there are a lot of nicer choice OCaml , its basically sml only more popular and used more in real life Haskell , again more popular , and used more in real life Idris , newer and said to be more progressive F# , a more practical choice and similar to sml a lisp , well if you want to focus on the functional part and less on the types part
because SML is awesome, isn't going to change and is simple. you can learn the syntax in an afternoon, and really focus on learning FP semantics.
150 was one of my favorite courses at CMU; each homework really made me feel like I unlocked a new level of reasoning with code.