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> Exactly. I don't know why Haskell fanboys insist on abstracting us so far from the machine.

I believe it is because abstractions are the way we have always made progress. Is the C code that's so close to the machine not just an abstraction of the underlying assembly, which is an abstraction of the micro operations of your particular processor, which in turn is an abstraction of the gate operations? The abstractions allow us to offload a significant part of mental task. Imagine trying to write an HTML web page in C. Sure it's doable with a lot of effort, but is it as simple as writing it using abstractions such as the DOM?

> We live in a mutable physical universe that corresponds to a procedural program. One thing happens after another according to the laws of physics (which are the procedural program for our universe).

You just proved why abstractions are useful. "One thing happens after another" is simply our abstraction of what actually happens, as demonstrated by e.g. the quantum eraser experiment [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs

discuss

ukj|6 years ago

>I believe it is because abstractions are the way we have always made progress.

>The abstractions allow us to offload a significant part of mental task

Edge/corner cases in our abstractions is also how propagation of uncertainty[1] happens. You can't off-load error-correction [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction

Schoolmeister|6 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "You can't off-load error-correction". In the case of classical computing, we do off-load error-correction (I don't have to worry about bit flips while typing this). In the case of quantum computing, if we couldn't offload error-correction, an algorithm such as Shor's wouldn't be able to written down without explicitly taking error-correction into account. Yet, it abstracts this away and simply assumes that the logical qubits it works with don't have any errors.