Re: Programming skills required by mathematicians?

On Jun 28, 3:38 am, rAgAv <ragav.pa...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > My post mentioned C++, Java, Fortran, OCaml, SML,
> > Haskell, Prolog, Mercury, SQL, Erlang, Ruby, Python, and Perl.
>
> Thanks Marshall. I checked on the programs you mentioned here and some
> of them seem really awesome. But, I don't know a morsel about them
> (except for SQL, which according to my current knowledge of its
> basics, seems nothing more than a database storage software). I
> especially found SML, Prolog, Mercury and logic programs really
> fascinating to learn.
>
> How does one go about learning these programs without enrolling for
> formal courses offered by universities? Just by reading introductory
> books and practicing them? Are there any other ways?

It is the great blessing and the great curse of the field that
teaching oneself how to program is quite easy.

Reading introductory books and diving right in, following chapter
by chapter with one's own explorations is an excellent way to
go. Also one can pick up a lot by joining an online community,
and of course having people to ask questions of is great for
that occasional piece that doesn't quite make sense. For
SML that's likely to be comp.lang.functional.

The great benefit of this sort of thing is that it makes one
aware of the great diversity that is possible in the choice
of computing primitives. For a given problem, solutions
written in idiomatic C++, SML, and Mercury are going
to look wildly different. Also, each language will have
kinds of problems that it handles with trivial ease, while
the other languages have to sweat. One sees a similar
sort of diversity of systems and their primitives in logic.

Try to avoid falling in love with any one approach.
This advice may be futile since it seems that almost
everyone does it at some point. As long as you wake
up eventually and tell your old flame that you want to
start seeing other compilers, it's OK.

Since your interest is in math, I want to go back and
repeat something someone said earlier, and recommend
you pay attention to computer algebra systems. These
are likely to be more directly applicable to much of
what you're going to be doing.

Good luck, and have fun!


Marshall