Ah... there really needs to be more literature written on switching to the
functional paradigm, IMHO.
That is really these guys haven't had an easy time with it.
On 4/11/07, Ryan Dickie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I thought I could resist this thread but I'll bite =:-()
The first language i learned was basic. No real functions, simple step by
step instructions. I then learned hypercard, c, c++, python, assembly, vhdl,
and too many others!
Now i've decided to learn haskell. I view it as a mathematicians language.
I do research in the field of medical imaging.. particularly processing
large cardiac data sets to figure out characteristics, diseases, etc. Why
workflow generally starts out as 1) mathematical idea 2) turn that pure
equation into a numerical recipe 3) implement, debug 5) analyze 6) goto step
1. I find doing my thinking in the continous domain makes things a lot
easier.
But here's where i differ from everyone else. I already have the
mathematical relationships all nice and tidy (hopefully!) in my head before
i start. I literally just implement it. I don't want to care about
threading, IO, message passing, or numerical stability. I have to care about
performance but only so far as it hampers my productivity. Preferably the
language will do it implicitly.
Your average programmer wants a language to do tasks. Having to think
about the math and relationships behind it all is rather sickening to them
(and me too!).
I am a new haskell programmer (basically a week into it!). It is by far
the hardest language i've had to pick up. A lot of my code could be
structured in a functional way.. but almost all reply on looping techniques
(would take a lot of work to rethink my gradient descent method and make it
fast!). Regardless of actually using haskell.. i like to transfer these
techniques to c++. Before i even knew of haskell i knew some FP methods and
i found that using these shrunk my code, shrunk the bugs, and did nice
things for performance + concurrency. In fact, I just read a google paper on
their batch system. They use to functions: map and reduce. They can easily
split it up over their cluster etc... these are the ideas of FP that i like!
That and the set-builder notation.
I also hate matlab to death. Is there any possibility of using haskell as
a replacement using ghci? Mostly i care about linalg when it comes to using
matlab.
ps: sorry if gmail butchered this reply. I had subscribed to the digest
and turns out that was a mistake :D
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