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jove_ | 5 months ago
There seems to be this weird idea in the functional community that the existence of some construction of one thing in another shows that one of those things is "more fundamental" than the other, when in reality this is often a circular exercise. e.g. Functions can be formalized as sets and sets can be formalized as functions.
Even worse in this specific case, the Church-Turing thesis tells us that they're equivalent, which is the only sensible answer to the question of which is more fundamental. There's an oft quoted phrase of "deep and abiding equivalencies" and it bears pointing out how deep and abiding these equivalencies are. From a formal perspective they are the same. Yes, there's arguments could be made that typed lambda calculus and its relation to logic are important, and that's true but it's not a formal argument at all and I think it's best to be clear on that.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai|5 months ago
I realize that these models of computation are equivalent. My point was rather that the imperative paradigm collapses into the functional paradigm in practical programming when I disregard the admissibility of arbitrary side effects.
> e.g. Functions can be formalized as sets and sets can be formalized as functions
I can derive functions from set theory in my sleep, and I can kickstart set theory without functions, but I wouldn't know how to define the concept of a function without sets. And even if I did: I can't even specify the characteristic function of a set without resorting to the inclusion relation.
> But it's hard to argue the machine at the end is stateless.
I'm not really that interested in the relationship between the various paradigms and the machine. What interests me most is how well I, as a human being, can write non-trivial programs. To me, it is immediately obvious that the composition of purely functional program units is conceptually simple enough to be done by a child, while unrestricted side effects can very quickly make things very complicated. However, I don't want to get involved in the discussion on this topic. I have accepted that others see it differently, although I find that completely baffling. I don't want to take away anyone's for loops, etc. To each their own.
cubefox|5 months ago
But in practical programming with imperative languages, arbitrary side effects can't be disregarded, so they don't collapse into the functional paradigm. In fact, from a physical perspective, every possible CPU has states, so the most physically fundamental model of computation (something like register machines, or GOTO programs) is imperative and more fundamental than functional models, like untyped lambda calculus. Functional models might be more mathematically elegant though.
> I wouldn't know how to define the concept of a function without sets.
Whitehead and Russell showed how to define functions just in first-order logic with identity, without requiring any set theoretical axioms, by defining an n-ary function via an n+1 place relation. See here top right: https://mally.stanford.edu/Papers/rtt.pdf
This is quite natural, because predicates (properties and relations) already occur in natural language, while sets do not; they are a mathematical abstraction. For example, sets can be empty, or arbitrarily nested, or both arbitrarily nested and otherwise empty, which has no analog in natural language.
> I can't even specify the characteristic function of a set without resorting to the inclusion relation.
If you try to define sets by using functions, functions are in this context assumed to be more fundamental than sets. Then you don't need to define functions. Then the inclusion relation is simply defined via the characteristic function. You don't need to define that function. Just like you, in the reverse case, don't need to define sets, if you want to define functions via sets.
jove_|5 months ago