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Closed 11 years ago.
ok, so is there a programming language that frees you from clarifying your ideas?
I couldn't help asking. But if there is one, what would you say comes closest today?
You mean, a programming language that lets you program without explaining what you want the program to do?
No, how would that work? The compiler needs to be told what program to compile.
Digging out an old, somewhat appropriate quote from Charles Babbage:
On two occasions I have been asked,
'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into
the machine wrong figures, will the
right answers come out?' I am not able
rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke
such a question.
The compiler can't read your mind. The only way it can create a program to do what you want is to tell it what it is you want.
Of course, there are languages that free you from having to specify things that are irrelevant to your overall problem and are only relevant to the underlying implementation. (an obvious example is that most modern languages free you from having to worry about pointers or many other low-level concerns. Many languages also give you ways to iterate over sequences without having to write a manual for-loop. But you still have to "clarify your ideas", you still have to specify what your program should do. The best a language can do is free you from clarifying the things that are not relevant to your ideas.
That shouldn't be the role of a language, in my view. Instead, the language should help you to clarify your ideas, and let you express those clarified ideas in as intuitive a way as possible.
You could see it from two angles:
High-level languages like Prolog
free you from having to express every
messy detail of your algorithm. You just
sketch the high-level picture, and
prolog fills in the details (e.g.,
how to do search and deduct the
answers to your questions, etc).
On the other side of the spectrum,
low-level languages like C free you
from having to express your ideas in
an abstract way. You can just give a
sequence of very concrete, detailed
procedural steps (although you can
optionally introduce abstractions if
you want to).
So both extremes free you from certain aspects of expressing and clarifying your ideas.
I don't think so, but there are a few that prevent you from clearly expressing those ideas - I nominate BCPL.
For various problem domains, there are languages that free you from having to type a lot of stuff beyond what's necessary to clarify your ideas. But every language fails in some situations, and for some people. Not everybody is comfortable expressing their ideas in an object oriented design (say, C# or Java), as functions and closures (Scheme), as logical derivations (Prolog -- there are some problems for which it fits!), or as declarative statements of the desired result (XSLT, CSS, various DSL's, with varying success) -- yet each of these is the right answer in certain contexts, and most of them overlap to some extent. Indeed, few modern languages are all that purely oriented to single paradigms.
But some languages favour other things over expressiveness: such as having efficient implementations (C), or being easy to learn (say, Python or its scripting kindred).
I hope there isn't a language that frees you from clarifying your ideas. It should be the responsibility of all programmers to do that themselves, not to pass it off to some other person or programming construct.
All good points, was thinking more along the lines of scripting languages, where you can type away in the debugger until it does what you want (I've done that a time or two for some sysadmin wmi scripts).
Yes, Whitespace.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have been trying my hand at php for quite some time but dont think i have reached the level of expertise i desired.I started reading an ebook and writing down all the code examples present there on my own,which i think is inefficient.
My question is addressed to anyone who's an expert in any programming language.I just wanna know how do you guys do what you do so well,and as i mentioned in the title,what is the most efficient way to approach a new programming language so as to gain maximum from it making it an enriching experience.I love coding,have studied quite a few languages but left them all at intermediate levels after learning the basics and some advanced portions.
Wanna excel at php,so any tips would be really helpful from any of you highly skilled programmers on the website.
Thanks!
I find that the most useful thing to do when trying to learn in programming is just to work at it. Just looking and copying someone elses code isn't going to get you very far, you'll learn faster by trying to attempt something, and you're probably not going to succeed for a while, but keep working at it, fixing bugs as you go, and it'll just start to stick.
Also the php.net documentation is pretty fantastic, so just keep that open as you go.
In php, try to make a basic dynamic site, then work your way up.
The thing that takes you from intermediate to expert is a combination of: practice, reading other people's code, and understanding the language specification and libraries.
Once you are at intermediate level, your primary reference should be the language definition and library documentation, and for third party libraries, their documentation, and their code, as necessary.
You can also consult advance-level third party materials, and try to implement relatively advanced or fundamental programming concepts (e.g. continuations) in the language, to push your understanding.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I looked at Haskell web frameworks like Snap and Yesod. Most seem to implement an MVC-ish approach reminding me of web frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Yes, MVC can be achieved with FP, but IMHO it doesn't show the great advantages of an FP approach. As HTTP is a stateless protocol, I would have hoped that there might be an Haskell framework that takes a more original, more pure functional approach. Are there any?
I'm not sure which features in FP you would like a framework to utilize, but I think Yesod uses some features to great benefit. (Happstack does as well, but I'm just not as familiar with it.)
Type-safe URLs eliminate an entire class of typo-generated bugs, plus automatically deal with input validation.
Proper typing practically eliminates XSS attacks.
Depending on the scope of data you're dealing with, using either STM or MVars for your storage needs make it easy to avoid race conditions and deadlocks in multi-threaded applications.
I'm sure there's a lot more that I'm not thinking of, but I hope that makes the point. But perhaps what you're looking for is something like a continuation-based framework. I personally think they're a bad idea (I'm a believer in REST), but I suppose it might seem more "functional."
It depends what you're trying to achieve. If by stateless you actually mean stateless, I use the templating framework Hakyll to generate static pages. It has an interesting structure to deal with dependencies and file updates.
I think WardB was asking not about fancy types, but rather about the denotative/stateless semantics of FP, in contrast to imperative/nondenotative (and often nondeterministic) semantics of things like IO and STM.
It's this denotative aspect that supports precise & tractable reasoning.
The term "functional" has been stretched to embrace imperative/nondenotative programming as well, which often leads to confusion.
Peter Landin recommended replacing "functional" with "denotative" to help clear up exactly this sort of confusion.
I don't know of any denotative (nonimperative) Haskell web frameworks.
Getting there would probably require breaking some long-standing imperative mental habits.
Which is to say: interesting work!
I was looking for the same but haven't really found it. Specifically I was looking for a continuations approach that renders traditional HTTP sessions unnecessary. These sorts of frameworks are quite popular in Scheme. The closest that I found was Chris Eidhof's answer to the Arc Challenge :-
https://gist.github.com/260052
It's a sketchy prototype and probably many man-months away from being something that you could use for serious work. If my Haskell skills were better, I might be tempted to try and develop it.
I also believe that WASH also took this approach but that seems to have died. I'm pinning my hopes on mysnapsession as I believe that is also looking at a continuations based session facility which would be exciting because I have been very impressed with the quality of the rest of Snap and the momentum behind it.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Like most ppl, I started with and still do a lot of imperative code(mostly Java, Ruby, Javascript).
I've never been a big fan of OO, either because I never understood it properly or because I don't think OO.
Got my first glimpse of FP via javascript, passing functions around, closures, etc. Have been in love with FP since then.
Recently, I've developed interest in Clojure (and may be Scala) and someday might even have a go at Haskell. I like what I see in the functional approach, but how do I think functional? I've been doing imperative stuff for the past 3-4 yrs and my brain tends to think imperative while approaching a problem.
How can I unlearn the imperative style(do I need to?) and think more functionally ?
No. Don't unlearn imperative style as you'll still need it. Even many well-done FP libraries look somewhat imperative under the covers. It's better to think in terms of adding FP to your list of tools and techniques rather going full-metal with one technique or the other.
Now, as to how you go about learning the FP style? Toy projects - or utility project you write for your own use. Or hell, write yourself yet another blog - but with a twist! The key thing, as was stated above, is practice. When doing so, avoid shared state. Strive for purity (that is, avoid side effects) in as many places as you can. Use closures, pattern matching (if the language supports it) and lambda functions. Think in terms of functions being first-class data types in your program - take them as input and return them as output. The list goes on, but you'll see the same concepts repeated time and again if you're watching for them.
If you feel you need a gentle nudge in this regard, use a tool (language) that encourages the FP style such as F# or Scala.
If you feel you need more of a "tough love" kind of help, reach for Haskell :)
Otherwise use the tool of your choice and just keep FP concepts (above) in mind. If you decide go this route there's a pretty good book called Real-World Functional Programming that uses F# and C# to illustrate techniques that apply in both a "mostly" FP language (F#) and a "mostly" OO language C#.
Go for Haskell. Because it's pure you are forced to think functional. In F# or Scala you still can write very imperative code. I strongly recommend the book by Graham Hutton on Haskell.
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Closed 10 years ago.
i was thinking learn a more low level language like C, but before it i'd like some opnion about:
what's the second language do you recommend to learn?
learn a low level language will make me a better programmer?
it's really necessary learn a second programming language?
Going backwards:
(3) Absolutely - you'll increase your ability by orders of magnitude by learning multiple languages.
(2) A low level language will make you a better programmer - alternatively a functional language will help as well.
(1) Low-level: go with C. Functional, try Scheme or Haskell. C also gives you the ability to write extension modules to Python if you ever have the need.
what's the second language do you recommend to learn?
Something imperative (i.e. same paradigm) but different. Python is dynamically typed with significant whitespace, so something statically types without significant whitespace: e.g. Java or C#.
These would also make a nice stepping stone towards C. The benefit of C is you really know what's going on, but with the disadvantage that you have to control it all. This level of control is not need for most business problems.
it's really necessary learn a second programming language?
Really subjective, but most good developers know many (consider for a web app: Python, Ruby, C#, Java on the server; SQL on the database and JavaScript on the client; and then the mark-up...).
You benefit from being able to see other approaches to problems and thus create better solutions. So once you have covered more imperative languages move into other paradigms like functional.
I agree with your choice of C, which leads on to C++. If nothing else, learning C will teach you why people these days tend to prefer languages with automatic memory management - but it will potentially also give you a feeling of programming "close to the metal" (without the pain of programming in assembly language), and help you to understand how a processor actually works. Not always useful knowledge but it's nice to know.
Whatever you choose, I recommend a statically-typed language - C, C++, Java, and some functional programming languages fit this bill. Java might be a good choice if you find C a bit tough at first.
I'd say learning any new language makes you a better programmer. However, will learning C make you a better Python programmer? Probably not; why should it?!
Define "necessary"! By a strict definition, no. But you're missing out on the experience of having to think about things in a different way (even if it's only a slightly different way).
I would stay with the same paradigm, but leave options open for another paradigm (functional programming). Probably C# is a good choice, because
If you decide to learn C/C++ later, it'll become a bit easier.
If you decide you want to learn functional programming later, you can switch to F# but still use existing code written in C#, because you stay within .NET framework.
Python is not known to be a remarkably fast language. You should consider learning a language which allows better computational performance. But good old ANSI C is probably too low level, despite you can write very fast programs with it. C# has OK performance for a just-in-time compiled language, and if you need more performance later, you can still extend your knowledge towards F# or C.
Although I don't use Microsoft Windows privately and advertise Linux and Open Source frequently, it's probably a good idea to offer some knowledge about Microsoft technology in case you intent to earn money with programming.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Okay, so far, I have been taking computer science courses in my high school and doing some of my own research on the web, and I have found I really like the subject. However, the computer science courses, having given me a small amount of experience in a few languages (C++, java, and python), leave me wondering where to go for development on my own.
I would like to create desktop applications, or even web applications if I could wrap my head around it. What language would you think would best facilitate this?
As a side-note, what are some good books or online documents that explain general computer science topics? I have found some good ones, but they haven't given me the depth I really want.What are some good ones?
Find an "itch"--a program you wish existed, that would be useful for you to have, but you can't find (or costs money). Then try writing it, using online resources (like Stack Overflow) to help you.
At this stage in your career, language doesn't matter very much. Some languages are better than others at certain tasks, but often your own level of comfort with the language outweighs other issues. So just pick a language you're interested in, and a project you're interested in, and get to work.
You may find that you need to start with a simpler project, or you may find more resources for a different language or framework. But getting started with something--no matter what that something is--is probably the most important thing.
Here is a classic but still quite relevant book if you ever want to level up from coder to software engineer.
Since you're still in high school, I would tell you that time is on your side. You have plenty of time to develop as a computer scientist. Therefore, take the long view for your development. So it's much better for you to understand the abstractions that underly software technology.
In my humble opinion, C++ and Java will always be around and you have plenty of time to develop your skills in that arena. However, a higher level language like Scheme or Python will pay plenty of dividends. You might find this recommendation highly enlightening.
In addition, every application will deal with a database as its system of record. Understanding SQL and data modeling is a win-win.
Also, understanding formal logic and/or discrete mathematics is indispensable for computer science. Computer languages are nothing but formal languages for executing
procedures: i.e. mathematical induction is used to define their syntax and semantics.
It sounds like you would enjoy jumping into a high level, modern language that's native to the operating system you want to target; Objective-C or C# for example. On the other hand if you really want to do something for the web, building a web app isn't much harder (there are just more choices to pick from for the back end and front end technologies you decide to use).
Basically, decide what project you want to work on and choose the best language for it. What really matters is that you're working on something.
What language to further develop in?
Given that you know C++, Java, and Python already, a next language I might suggest would be SQL and DDL: defining databases, and getting data in and out of them.
If your CS course didn't touch on it, I highly advise spending a bit of time with a more functional style of language like erlang, haskell or even lisp.
They won't become your day-to-day hacking language overnight, but can really help you grasp important programming concepts relavent accross all languages.
....especially the one about choosing the right language for the task at hand.