On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Dan Drake <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 18 Nov 2014 at 01:34PM -0800, William Stein wrote: >> When arguing for Maple's language over the Mathematica language, they >> say "Functional programs are often opaque; most people, even >> experienced programmers, find functional-style programs to be >> significantly harder to write, read, and debug." > > Perhaps I'm biased because I'm taking the edX functional programming > MOOC right now, but isn't one of the arguments *for* functional > programming style is that it is easier to debug, since you can reason > about each of your functions separately, without tracking the state?
My personal experience with types of programming languages is that functional/object oriented/etc. is terrible for one class of problems and awesome for another. You're definitely doing the right thing by learning several approaches well. The sort of statement that Maple document makes is really the worst possible thing, namely to declare an entire style of programming inferior on general principle. I'm glad Python supports several different styles, though I do wish Python had better functional support than it does (e.g., lambda functions, scoping), since that would make it even more flexible... I'm really glad that Sage has a fast C-level binding to lisp built in by default, even if I don't use it so much. (Thanks Nils.) - William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
