Re: Mathematica daily WTF
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg115163] Re: Mathematica daily WTF
- From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 03:55:55 -0500 (EST)
On 1/2/11 at 4:54 AM, dave at removedbailey.co.uk (David Bailey) wrote: >Procedural code lets anyone, 'hack' any process they desire, whereas >functional code becomes conceptually harder and harder as >complications set it - at least to those of us who spent many years >writing code in C and Fortran! >As regards aesthetics, I'd say that sometimes functional code looks >much more elegant than the procedural equivalent, but other times, >it just looks obscure! I think the obscurity of functional code is largely a matter of what you get used to. When I first started with Mathematica, I only used procedural code since this is what I had been used to with C or C++. But it has been years since I've done anything in C or C++. I now use Mathematica on a daily basis and it has been so long since I've used procedural code I have to refer to the documentation to check syntax. I am now at the point where I find it much easier to understand functional Mathematica code than procedural Mathematica code.