Haskell is to math as Perl is to English?
The Endeavour 2014-05-29
Fortran superficially looks like mathematics. Its name comes from “FORmula TRANslation,” and the language does provide a fairly straight-forward way to turn formulas into code. But the similarity to mathematics ends there at the lowest level of abstraction.
Haskell, on the other hand, is more deeply mathematical. Fortran resembles math in the small, but Haskell resembles math in the large. Haskell has mathematical structures at a higher level of abstraction than just formulas. As a recent article put it
While Fortran provides a comfortable translation of mathematical formulas, Haskell code begins to resemble mathematics itself.
On its surface, Perl is one of the least English-like programming languages. It is often criticized as looking like “line noise” because of its heavy use of operators. By contrast, Python has been called “executable pseudocode” because the source is easier to read, particularly for novice programmers. And yet at a deeper level, Perl is more English-like than other programming languages such as Python.
Larry Wall explains in Natural Language Principles in Perl that he designed Perl to incorporate features of spoken language. For example, Perl has analogs of articles and pronouns. (Larry Wall studied both linguistics and computer science in college.) Opinions differ on how well his experiment with incorporating natural language features into programming languages has worked out, but it was an interesting idea.
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