From: Todd Gillespie <toddg@...>
Date: 2001-09-22T09:28:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21510] Re: SV:  Re: Ruby/objects book in style of The Little Lisper

On Sat, 22 Sep 2001, Kevin Smith wrote:
> --- Mikkel Damsgaard <mikkel_damsgaard@mailme.dk> wrote:
> > Hey! Ruby is proper tail recursive, so since the
> > recursive  factorial is much easier to understand 
> 
> Sorry, I disagree. Recursion is "cool", but is rarely
> simpler to understand. Especially for non-technical folks.
> 
> > Math is a nicely simple extrepsion of abstract ideas.
> > Ideally to start off a book with imho.
> 
> If your audience is programmers, or math-people, sure. If
> your target audience is an eight year old boy, a 75 year
> old grandmother, and a janitor who is considering a career
> change, it is completely inappropriate.
> 
> One of the reasons I didn't get a CS degree is because they
> required so much bloody math. I got a business degree
> instead. Programming isn't about math. It's about logic,
> and sociology/psychology. 
> 

I normally dislike his books, but sometimes a Heinlein quote is choice:

   "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best
    he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and
    not make messes in the house."
                -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

If you don't want to use recursion, fine, your call.  But I think it
wildly improper for you to speak for broad swaths of users who may not
have your same biases regarding mathematics.  As for that, I should only
say that mathematicians have not spent the last few thousand years trying
to be 'cool', and that formal, simple definition of abstract concepts is
what has made possible many things, amongst them programming.

Your counterexample fields are quite incorrect as well.  Logic is all
about set theory, and sociology and psychology are heavily dependent upon
statistics.


Anyway, have a nice weekend.


P.S.: oh, and "math-people"? We like the phrase "educated".