Learn Physics with Functional Programming

Re:Learn Physics with Functional Programming by ogjdrjvf on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @07:54PM (#37399492)

I don't think the MIT guys have the same motivations as the author of this book. He (Walck) discusses the suitability of (a subset of) Haskell in this article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.4880

Maybe someone else can shed light on the MIT mindset. Certainly some of Walck's points apply to Scheme as much as to Haskell, but Scheme lacks the type system, syntax and syntactical "convenience" of curried functions. The basic strength of functional programming is the lack of complex imperative book-keeping: your code looks more like math.

My impression is that SICP and SICM are eccentric.

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Re:Learn Physics with Functional Programming by tobinfricke on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @08:05PM (#37399583)

> Scheme lacks the type system, syntax and syntactical "convenience" of curried functions.

The argument is that all of that syntax is a distraction.

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Re:Learn Physics with Functional Programming by leppr on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @03:31AM (#37402272)

Yes, and that's like arguing that spaces between words is syntactic distraction. It's clearly not, more syntax rules can make a language simpler to understand (for both humans and computers).

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