yes, spreadsheets are great. I work 1000x faster in Excel than in Java. 'declarative' programming is the best solution when it works... again the limitation with Excel is it can only handle a 1 or 2 dimensional problem. work on a list of orders,etc... it can't handle more than a list of data easily, relational data doesn't work.
On Dec 31, 2:21 am, Alexey Zinger <[email protected]> wrote: > I predict in 30 years we'll be doing most of the programming in > spreadsheet-like > visualizations of data structures. Yes, I love me some spreadsheets. > > Alexey > > ________________________________ > From: ScottHK <[email protected]> > To: The Java Posse <[email protected]> > Sent: Thu, December 30, 2010 4:36:24 AM > Subject: [The Java Posse] programming theory: Quantum physics...to Java....to > Scala? > > Over the past 30 years we have been moving up from Assembly code...to > Scala. > > Do programmers need to understand quantum mechanics to program? I > don't think so, programmers don't need to know assembly either. > > In computer science history, each new language development helped us > do more by forcing us to do less. In the lowest level, 'the heap', > all data as Global and the only data type is 'byte'. So with assembly > languages you can do anything.. Procedural languages such as C added > simple data types and encouraged us to package state changes into > functions. Object oriented languages encouraged us to limit the > number of states by chunking data into objects. Ruby and Java helped > object oriented programming by adding a lot of 'context' to the > language and cutting back on boiler plate code vs C++. > > Now 'functional programming' further encourages us to package chunks > of states that go into and out of functions and reduce immutable > state. > > Is the long run, will we reduce all mutable state accessible by the > programmer? I'm guessing in the future I think programmers will be > moving abstract concepts around around in 3d and a Google App engine > will turn it into gigabytes of assembly code. > > What do people think is needed most right now for the next generation > of languages? All my current programming problems involve dependent > states...such as keeping track of the sum of a list of orders, and > doing this with 3 or 4 levels of dependancy. Also working with > vertical problems, getting a simple function result normally, but > having some objects reach up much higher in the dependency stack when > errors occur. Some of the really cool Scala features help out with > these types of problems, list functions like .foldLeft and .foreach > and take a layer of complexity out of some problems. I think us > human programmers can only think efficiently in 2D and the more the > languages takes out the multi-dimensional complexity out the more we > can do. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The > Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
