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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Are academics born with python knowledge? you still need to learn that range(10) is exclusive of the number ten, and that 'time' itself is not a function. Julia for example is much further from 'natural language' programming and seems quite popular.

It's more important that the language can accurately and succinctly represent the mental model for the task at hand, and the whole point of this article is that Swift can offer a syntax that is _more_ aligned with the domain of ML while offering superior performance and unlocking fast development of the primitives.

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Julia is similar to matlab by design, which makes it easier for science and engineering folks who are already familiar with it.

I think functional programming advocates underrate simplicity of procedural languages. Programming is not math, algorithms are taught and described as a series of steps which translate directly to simple languages like Fortran or Python.

I think ML is great, but I’m skeptical if it is a big win for scientific computing.

Are algorithms and theory behind them not math themselves?

They are proven with with math, but their implementation in code certainly isn’t. If it were that simple, we would be using languages like Coq and TLA+ for writing software. But we usually don’t, because math does not cleanly translate into usable programs, it needs a human to distill it into the necessary steps the computer must follow.

No really. They are math themselves. Algorithms have nothing to do with implementation. The whole CLRS books algorithms are written with pseudocode. By your logic Turing machines and many other models of computations are not math. Just something is imperative doesn't mean it's not mathematics.

This is a pretty pedantic definition.

Plenty of excellent programmers are not mathematicians. How would that work if programming were just math? That’s like saying physics is just math while ignoring all of the experimental parts that have nothing to do with math.

Range is a concept from mathematics, so an academic should know it regardless if they know Python or not.

Most of the concepts in Python come from academics and mathematics, so it's an easy transition. I don't think math has a time concept in a straight forward way, so time is an edge case in Python.

Have you ever come across a bug where range(10) doesn't get to 10? Even if it is assumed knowledge, it doesn't seem to me to even approach the level of assumed knowledge of time coming from a 'Foundation' library rather than... you know... a time library.

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