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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