Re:Ask HN: How to deal with the tedium of programming?
by gclaramunt on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @10:48AM
(#9692576)
for me a new-ish thing dependent types (I have a small experience with Coq)
But yeah, since Turing and Church the fundamentals of computation hasn't changed. Nil novum sub sole
Re:Ask HN: How to deal with the tedium of programming?
by sklogic on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @05:41PM
(#9695697)
Dependent types are making their way into more practical applications now, yes, but the concept itself is also not new at all, it stems from the Curry-Howard isomorphism, which is known for far more than 30 years.
So, back to the point: anyone who knew how to program 30 years ago would easily pick it up now, without any significant learning.
Re:Ask HN: How to deal with the tedium of programming?
by gclaramunt on Thursday June 11, 2015 @10:06AM
(#9699769)
I guess my point is if you learned to program 30 years ago using functional programming with dependent types and category theory, it must have been an awesome place to work/study, and I envy you.
Which university it was?
Which concepts exactly?
> Applicative functors seems an example of something "new"
Too small a thing to be fundamental, to require any degree of re-learning.
Of course there is a lot of new fancy syntax sugar and all that, but the nature of the lazy languages did not change a bit since Miranda. If you knew Miranda, you'll learn Haskell in no time, and 30 years in between them would not make it any harder.