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Comment by SaxonRobber | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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