Timeline for What programming language should a professional mathematician know?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 22, 2018 at 18:03 | comment | added | Elliot Gorokhovsky | Another reason to learn Haskell: the diagrams EDSL, a good alternative to TikZ. | |
| Aug 21, 2018 at 21:45 | comment | added | dvitek | Hi @ArasErgus, I've done so. I also apologize for the "not a helpful answer..." language - it sounds harsher than what I intended, which was more "you're not giving Haskell the credit it deserves for being a good general-purpose mathematical programming language." | |
| Aug 21, 2018 at 21:43 | history | edited | dvitek | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added commented responses to main answer (per request)
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| Aug 21, 2018 at 13:11 | comment | added | Aras Ergus | I agree that that's an important point that is missing in my original answer. I'd like to encourage you to extend the answer with it as you seem to know some nice examples of Haskell code resembling mathematical notation. | |
| Aug 21, 2018 at 12:19 | comment | added | dvitek | As an example of what I'm talking about, see katlas.org/wiki/The_Kauffman_Bracket_using_Haskell, specifically the last 8 lines (where four cases of the "kauffman" function) are defined. This is exactly how the Kauffman bracket is defined in talks - just do a recursive computation. Pretty much everything else is syntactic sugar. One nice thing about languages like Haskell is that we don't have to set up a syntax for "iterate over all vertices" or anything like that - we can just say "here's what I want, here's how you do the expansion, here are the base cases, now tell me the answer". | |
| Aug 21, 2018 at 12:17 | comment | added | dvitek | I think this is not a helpful answer for motivating why a non-category-theorist/logician should learn Haskell. The advantage of statically-typed functional* languages like Haskell for any mathematical computation is that one can describe to the computer how to do computations in a way that is very similar to how mathematicians describe to one another how to do computations. *(There are a few more features that really make this straightforward but are a bit too technical to enumerate here.) | |
| Aug 21, 2018 at 11:18 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Aug 21, 2018 at 8:48 | history | answered | Aras Ergus | CC BY-SA 4.0 |