Here’s an exercise in separating fundamentals from conventions: if we held a technical summit with all of the galaxy’s advanced alien civilizations, what would we find we had in common, and what would we find inscrutable?
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We’d have transactions as a way of running concurrent operations atomically. We’d have most of Knuth’s algorithms in common (maybe they’d have some major breakthroughs we lack!)
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The goal of a high level programming language is to be something that we and these alien civilizations could agree on as universal and principled, and free of quirks and arbitrarity.
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could you expand on pure functions being a special case, and not the ones with side effects?
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Pure functions have many useful properties that can be used in generic types all the way up to proving programs correct. They enable us to reason about equality of unknown values derived from complex expressions involving unknown pure functions.
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I assume something similar to functional patterns would be shared, things such as map and filter, in one way or another would show up. But that's it. They might not even have our notion of conditions or loops at all
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Philip Wadler has a persuasive answer with logic yielding programming languages (e.g. lambda calculus).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU …
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payoff: "[The core of Functional Languages] is not arbitrary. Their core is something that was written down once by a logician, and once by a computer scientist. That is, it was not invented, but discovered."
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