Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell, Python (2011)

I dream of material that would explain some advanced (for a regular person understanding of the word) math concepts using Python. Maybe it's because I've programmed more in my life than did math, but the "language" we use to write it is absolutely crazy: one letter variables everywhere, no structure, thousands of custom notations etc. I'm not criticising it, I realise it exists this way for a reason and if I wasn't so lazy I would have learnt it in…

Nice to see this. I'm convinced, from long experience, from long experience, that functional collections are stylistically superior to imperative collections, even in otherwise imperative code. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the worst mistake van Rossum made in designing Python was not to use functional collections. Then we wouldn't need to discuss how to copy them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201033 There also wouldn't be this bug where using an empty list as the default value of an optional…

> Mathematics has no side effects. I'm aware the author is a professor of CS, but this is a statement I always see people originally trained as programmers claim, and as a mathematician and a programmer I respectfully disagree. Mathematics does what you define it to do, and if you can communicate your idea to another person it doesn't matter whether you "mutated" a variable or not. Likewise, you could say that there's no such thing as mutation in programs…