Programming languages and math

I was thinking about programming languages today and it occurred to me
that math people were put in charge of developing programming
languages. When I was in college, for example, there was a Math/Comp
Sci department.

One of the problems that Chuck has pointed out is that programmers like
to solve the more interesting general problem so that their particular
problem falls out trivial.

Mathematicians are trained to work out general solutions this way so by
having them lead the development of computer science we got programming
languages for math people. Great for expressing algorithms, maybe not
so great for talking to computers. The tendency toward generalization
led to abstraction, which created problems that could only be solved
with more abstraction and more complexity. Things would have turned out
differently if linguists and physicists had developed computer science
instead. Okay, Chuck was a physicist.

That's my theory on how we got to where we are. Mathematicians like to
solve challenging problems, and there were plenty of them to be found
in compiler writing. I guess having a culture that reveres complexity
doesn't help.

Brad

.

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