Sure, but it doesn't mean that because someone uses an imperative way of counting, that it means people's brains work imperatively all the way. People tend to talk and communicate a lot in a declarative way no? For example ask someone that doesn't know programming how he we would make a paddleball game. I have no idea what that person would say, but I think it would something like: "I tell the computer that the paddle should move along with the mouse; and when the ball bounces against the paddle, the ball reverses direction; if the paddle misses the ball, it's game over". I don't think anybody would say: "each frame, the ball's position moves by a tiny timestep; when the mouse is sampled, copy the mouse position to the paddle; etc..."
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcop...@btinternet.com>wrote: > Peter Verswyvelen wrote: > >> I really doubt people tend to think in either way. It's not even sure our >> thinking can be modeled with computing no? >> > > Well, try this: Go ask a random person how you add up a list of numbers. > Most of them will say something about adding the first two together, adding > the third to that total, and so forth. In other words, the step by step > instructions. Very few of them will answer that the sum of an empty list is > defined to be zero, and the sum of a non-empty list is defined to be the > first number plus the sum of the list tail. > > Then again, few non-programmers will set anything about creating a counter > variable and initialising it to zero either; this is a programming > "artifact". (Humans don't think like this internally, but most programming > languages conceptually require it.) Nobody has much difficulty with this, so > maybe the only problem with Haskell is that everybody learns to program "the > other way" first, before they get to Haskell... > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >
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