The Law of Primacy

I consider the absolute worst programming construct to be subroutine or the function.          Cleo Saulnier 

Hello?!?! Why pay attention to some random crank on the Internet?
Because I think he is onto something important...

How Long?

It takes 100 years for an idea to go from inception to general acceptance.
Dijkstra[1]

When I first read this I thought it alarming.

Then I started collecting some historical tit-bits[2]…

Faith and Rats, Gödel and Computer Science

Computer scientists dismiss Gödel as mathematics
Mathematicians classify Gödel as logic
Logicians slot Gödel into meta-mathematics
Meta-mathematicians know the truth of the matter…
…and have been dead for a century

I would like to suggest that this misunderstanding (or rather non-understanding) does not make it non-true.¹ Many educated people do know that Gödel’s theorem(s) is important even portentous. But somehow – like war – Yeah its bad but not my problem.

Let’s use the services of

A fever is raging in the town.
People are dying.

And I happen to find…
In the closet…
A dead rat

“What do rats have to do with…”

The Plague?

Do we need to start having a fever and swelling in the armpits to change our minds?
To my mind the mathematicians and CSists who think of Gödel as irrelevant are like people with a dead rat in their closet who are now beginning to run a fever and who still keep insisting:
“Whats a dead rat to do with the plague? Why should I bother?”
Gödel’s theorem is a dead rat in plague infested town. In the 1930s, people understood this. Somehow now everyone has forgotten. This post is to remind of these well-known and more well-forgotten facts.

The Terrible Theorem

Starting with the cute paradoxical statement

This statement is false

which is true if its false and false if true,  Gödels theorem maps out the large gulf between what is provable and what is true.
Now on the face of it this seems like a ridiculous thing to make a song-n-dance about. Surely there are truths that we dont know (yet)? What of it? Then science studies better... Then some more truths are revealed... etc...

To understand why its a big deal we need to understand the difference between

Analytic and Synthetic Truths

Richard O'Keefe's responses to FP Timeline

Richard O'Keefe of Otago whose quote I started FP Timeline with, wrote me some rather detailed comments about history which have interesting titbits of info.

Functional Programming: A Moving Target

In my last post, I gave a functional programming time line in the last 50 years. Now I'll look at two things: The place of functional in ACM Curriculum 2013 and how C has messed up the notion of functional.

ACM Curriculum 2013

Functional Programming: A Timeline

Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more Cobol with one semester of Scheme and one semester of Cobol than you could with three semesters of Cobol.
Richard O'Keefe on Erlang list

Well that was before Functional Programming hit the headlines.
These days FP is quite a buzzword. Is this for good or bad?
If real world ≡ good well then Scala and Clojure and Erlang and Haskell becoming more and more 'real world' is a wonderful thing.
If what is good is understanding, then I am not so sure. Many things about programming, pedagogy and programming-pedagogy that were widely understood in the 1970s and 80s have mysteriously become un-understood today.
However in this darkening of the age there are some glimmers… eg ACM's 2013 curriculum.
In this post I would like to delineate a timeline of the semantics and significance of Functional in the last 50 years. In subsequent posts I'll try to deconstruct how the semantics has shifted around in this time.

Timeline

1957

The first programming language – Fortran

1957

The first functional programming language – For(mula)Tran(slator)

Why? Whoa! How?

Read on…

CS History 0

Are real numbers real?

Wait!! What does this have to do with programming? Or even computer science??

Sounds like angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin philosophy No??
NO!  CS came into existence because of this question!