On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:46 PM, David Barbour <dmbarb...@gmail.com> wrote:
Where we do give up determinism, it should be explicit and carefully > considered, and we should have a lot of control over exactly where it leaks > into our programs. > Hear, hear! And another thing: the mathematics of probability is pretty mature, relative to all this computation stuff that we're just now figuring out. Probability is highly applicable to (bounded) nondeterminism, but I get the impression that most CS theorists don't tend to learn much about it, and I know for sure that it gets extremely short shrift in the applied CS curriculum at my school. Dave Ungar loves being deliberately provocative, but I really don't understand why he's so attached to the (obviously unscalable) shared memory imperative programming model... except, perhaps, he thinks that's the only model the great unwashed masses of industry coders can handle. If so, I sure hope he's wrong. But, lets face it, after decades of real-world deployment, Erlang is still considered an exotic language, and hardly anybody outside the ivory towers has even heard of Kahn nets, FRP, CALM, etc. These don't get taught in the undergrad CS curriculum either. Programmers, like everybody else, only get to choose their problems inasmuch as they are aware of the choices. -- Max
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
