On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Robert Raschke <[email protected]> wrote: > ... > Haskell is mostly (in my eyes) an exercise in Type Theory. Influenced by the > whole "theorems as types, proofs as programs" thing. There's some > mathematician attached to that idea, whose name eludes me just now....
Alonzo Church? If not restrictive on "mathematician" per se, perhaps Robin Milner or Philip Wadler? Thanks for your comments on the importance of type theory to the family of programming languages that relies so heavily on them. It's interesting that their value is to impose a limit on lambda calculus, as Backus' emphasis on function-level programming is also a restriction on lambda calculus. I did get to ask a Stanford mathematician who teaches Category Theory whether learning it would be applicable to J. He said there would probably be some applicability, but probably less so than for Haskell. Given that mathematics is so "seamless" between areas of study, compared with most fields, I'm a bit shocked to discover how Balkanized the mathematically-oriented programming languages are. If that's the fact of the matter, though, I'll have to accept it. Apparently this is an area where things are genuinely complicated. Tracy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
