Re:Functors, applicatives, and monads in pictures
by wwweston on Sunday May 19, 2013 @07:56PM
(#5734988)
> It's just an arguably poorly chosen operator (Pascal gets this right and uses ":=" for assignment).
That's one potential takeaway, but when I turned over the complaint in my mind, this was arguably another way of complaining about mutability.
Also, given the timing, it's pretty likely that one of the languages they'd learned was Pascal: that was the language of the first few CS classes at my school in the 90s, it was also the language of any high school curriculum that led to the AP exam, and Borland's Pascal products were still pretty popular PC dev environments.
They could've also been unlucky and received their first exposure by choosing to do a numerical analysis class in Fortran or C, of course. :/
The trick is to stop reading that line (in your head) as "x is equal to x plus two", but instead "x is assigned the value of x plus two".