2017-08-03 – Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX7
temple roof, Doi Suthep, Thailand
(youtube) The Bangles « Walk Like an Egypytian »
this note is a bit of a pet peeve and it comes about because, in a lot of situations, Computer Science was placed under the Mathematics department (rather than, for example, the Engineering department) – so we end up with a dichotomy between « practical » languages and « ivory tower » languages – the practical languages are the day-to-day languages that everyone uses (ex. C, Fortran, COBOL, Python, Lua, BASIC, etc.) that get looked down on and denigrated
ivory tower languages are the results of growing up within the mathematics department, their descriptions are full of phrases like « proof of correctness » and « formal compiler verification », they attract followers for their novelty rather than for their application (ex. Lisps (and Schemes), Haskell, the ML family, etc.)
[from one perspective, being useful could be viewed as anathema to functional programming languages considering their hatred of « side effects »]