Re: Programming skills required by mathematicians?

On 3 Jul, 19:25, ju...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> On 2 Jul, 09:49, Han de Bruijn <Han.deBru...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Marshall wrote:
> > > On Jul 1, 7:40 am, hru...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Herman Rubin) wrote:
> > >>As for gotos, I find them easy to use,
> > >>and spaghetti code is best for spaghetti algorithms.
>
> > > Sure, gotos are easy to write, but what's usually im****tant
> > > for code is that it be easy to read and easy to maintain,
> > > and gotos are anathema to that.
>
> > I think nowadays nobody, except Herman, will argue in favour of gotos.
>
> FWIW, I would. In fact, my idea is that the two "poles", LLL and HLL,
> should finally split, where LLL is the only true programming possible,
> while HLL is to become the high-end side of user interfaces.
>
> In any case, there may be lots of reasons to "favour gotos", all
> invariably coming from those who have been programming for a life, at
> least in the sense of getting back to the roots of our practices and
> problems, and cleaning up to an otherwise unreachable next phase.


I wouldn't know what to suggest to the mathematician (maybe functional/
algebra systems programming?), but to the kid I'd still suggest BASIC,
in its original "basic" form. Then I'd say assembler and computer
architecture on a side, functional/logic/algebra programming on
another (the two poles). Then of course much more could follow.

-LV


>
> > On the other hand, I find that the Object Oriented Programming
paradigm
> > has given rise to bad programming practices, such as putting more and
> > more software layers on top of each other
>
> Yep, that is an easy example. What has gone wrong there?
>
> -LV
>
> > , so many that even a GigaHerz
> > processor can hardly plough through them, in execution time.
>
> > Han de Bruijn