> On Aug 31, 2017, at 6:27 PM, John McCall via swift-evolution
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I would argue that there is a much broader philosophical truth here.
> Programming is not, and never can be, a pure exercise in mathematics, and the
> concepts necessary for understanding programming are related to but
> ultimately different from the concepts necessary for understanding
> mathematics. That is, Dave Sweeris's mathematicians and physicists are
> almost certainly misunderstanding their confusion: saying that the syntax is
> wrong implies that there could be a syntax that could be right, i.e. a syntax
> that would allow them to simply program in pure mathematics.
I don't think any of them claimed that any particular programming language's
syntax was wrong, just that they were confused by it. I only have a clear(ish)
recollection of one of them -- the others were too long ago -- and he said
something along the lines of "Mathematica is as close as I get to programming
because I don't have time to learn how the CS people write things" (and I think
his hand was forced WRT learning even just that, because Mathematica was part
of a class he was teaching). Anyway, at the time, his sentiment struck me as
"not unique", so I'd guess that it tickled a memory of someone(s) expressing
somewhat similar views to me before. To be clear, I'm not claiming that view
towards programming is common in the general mathematician/physicist
population... When I find out someone's an expert in some field in math or
physics, I'll probably talk to them about that; programming isn't a subject I'd
be likely to raise unless their area of expertise is "Computational Whatever".
So not only is my dataset far too small, and merely anecdotal, it also suffers
from selection bias.
Anyway, the point I'm taking my own sweet time getting to is that if Swift's
goal is world domination, I think a good place to start with the scientific
community could be to let them use the same syntax they learned while spending
the better part of decade or more studying. Obviously, Swift already goes a
long way towards that goal by allowing custom unicode operators and such, but
if you're telling me that getting prettyprint might be in-scope(ish), too...
Well, I still think that in the long run that problem should to be solved by
the OS so that whatever data that ends up getting prettyprinted as "x²" will
render that same way in every application, even when sent to the console via
`print()` or `cout`. In the meantime I won't complain if the first step towards
that goal is getting it in the editor, but I worry that such an approach would
lead to us creating the 15th standard (https://xkcd.com/927/
<https://xkcd.com/927/>). And it's like my momma always said, "you should be
part of the solution, not part of the precipitate".
- Dave Sweeris
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