Re: ::scr Touchy Feely?

[Piers Cawley <pdcawley-scr@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Wednesday 23 October 2002 12:13, Simon Wistow wrote:
>
>> 1. Scientists
>> Lose touch with reality and don't remember the gritty soily joys of
>> getting down and hacking at code. Produce droppings which smell of
>> Academic Languages which, whilst technically excellent have little or no
>> practical value.
>
> IMHO, this prevalant attitude is part of where computing's gone wrong. It's 
> why people use languages like C or Perl or Java or COBOL when they could be 
> chucking around abstractions in the lambda calculus, which is a far less 
> error prone activity (and for those of you who say that's harder - it's just 
> *different*; you're not used to it; once you get the hang it's arguably 
> easier)
>
> A lot of compsci is about finding fundamental abstractions. We have 
> java.util.Collection classes, arrays, hashes, maps, tuples, lists, SQL 
> databases, filesystems, and whatnot when really they all just boil down to 
> variants on set theory! 

And which are lifted straight from Smalltalk.

> If people stepped back from the differences and saw that it's all
> just sets then these things would logically converge more,
> eventually sharing their interfaces so you wouldn't need a different
> mental model for each of these things.

Yes and no. Yes, be aware of them being 'just sets' but one should
also be aware of what a particular representation brings to the table,
and when it's appropriate to use each one. Hell, I can show you proof
that the individual counting numbers are just sets (I don't mean the
set of such numbers I mean the numbers themselves) built from nothing
more than the Zermelo Frankel axioms, but that doesn't have much in
the way of every day utility; it's more convenient to think of numbers
as being, well, numbers.

The same applies to the Smalltalk Collection classes (and by extension
to almost any other collection of Collection classes you're likely to
come across).

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?