Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

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Yep, sorry.

This is a matter of feeling, completely irrational, but just my experience.

When I program in lisp I get the same feeling when I'm solving an ODE by hand, or a Diophantine equation, or designing a numerical method to approximate the solution of a PDE, or finding the Euler-Lagrange equations of a physical problem. The thing is real and it gets shit done really fast; it is just exhilarating. Moreover, lisp macros are so dirty and fun that using them feels like kinky sex.

Haskell is like category theory. Sure, it is pure and general, and you can create set theory and the rest of math from it. But it is certainly the most boring thing that I can think about.

But hey, whatever floats your boat.

Do you prefer analysis over algebra? How do you eat your corn?

(I prefer algebra and Haskell. But I like Lisp well enough.)

I like geometry first, then algebra and analysis. I work mostly by teaching analysis and doing some research.

Now I want to really learn math. Is the aesthetic experience comparable to programming? Probably greater. I need something where I can invent if I want to get my fix. As a layperson, math never scratched that itch entirely (aside from proofs which as we know are basically programming).

Sounds more like applied math...

Nothing wrong with applied math. It's still math.

From the grandparent post:

> I followed a (pure) mathematics education...

Oh, OK, that's what you meant. Makes more sense.

I'm not so quick in judging people by how applied they are.

We mathematicians always try to come up with new pure fields, but then some other people always come and find some applications. Just see how cryptography and computer science sullied our beloved number theory!

(I mostly focused on the computer-science-y parts of math in my studies. Thinks like linear optimization and combinatorics. Not sure whether to count that as applied or pure. I guess I might get a purity pass, because we only ever proved our algorithms correct but seldom implemented them.)

Is it the type system?

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