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Orchid XP v8 schrieb:
> I think what happened is that somebody invented Prolog, and it makes it
> almost seem like the computer is "thinking". It lets the computer solve
> logical problems as if by magic (i.e., it doesn't look like a regular
> algorithm, it looks like real insight). And people thought that in a few
> years' time, somebody would come up with a set of predicates to describe
> the operation of a computer program, you'd put in a mathematical
> description of what the program is supposed to do, and Prolog would
> magically compute the most efficient sequence of machine instructions...
Yeah, that sounds plausible.
> ...which would just mean writing programs as mathematical statements
> rather than lists of instructions. It would just be another programming
> language. And, you know, people have argued that programming in Haskell
> is like programming with mathematics, so...
>
> [One might also mention Mathematica.]
Another fallacy of that time (and possibly with the functional
programming approach) was the assumption that computer programs would
always have the purpose of solving inherently mathematical problems -
and that programming would therefore always be done by studied
mathematicians.
Now I guess the math required to program a word processor or an e-mail
client is not /that/ complicated :-)
Unfortunately, the functional approach is quite brain-wrecking for
anyone not trained in university-level mathematical thinking - or so it
appears to me.
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