|
or crooked
Sin tack
the any key okay
|
|
|
|
|
I'd give you the answer, but I couldn't handle defame. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
|
|
|
|
|
Truthfully, I'm sitting on defense about that.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
|
|
|
|
|
Would you say it's accurate that all programming is essentially the process of writing functions that implement map, filter, and reduce? OK, one might argue that "fold", list comprehensions, and iterator generators should be added to that list, but in general, even the idea of persisting data to a DB or presenting data on a UI, is still one or more of those processes of M/F/R.
Discuss! 
Marc
Latest Article - Create a Dockerized Python Fiddle Web App
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
|
|
|
|
|
Disagree.
A screen saver generating random patterns
Tetris
And many others though my imagination is running dry
... such stuff as dreams are made on
|
|
|
|
|
if you want to simplify it like that then you should replace "programmers" with "employees."
BTW: I'm neither but do both. (And my difference is only 1 more process.)
Sin tack
the any key okay
|
|
|
|
|
I'm not an employee, I'm a resource.
|
|
|
|
|
F-ES Sitecore wrote: I'm not an employee, I'm a resource.
You realise technically that's far worse, both in meaning and implication.
If anyone ever called me that they would never see me again.
Sin tack
the any key okay
|
|
|
|
|
Lopatir wrote: You realise technically that's far worse, both in meaning and implication.
Exactly 
|
|
|
|
|
Lopitar, you're a resource of the earth. I guess I'll never see you... again.
|
|
|
|
|
Well, you won't when you respond to someone else's post.
This space for rent
|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources are things that are dug up, chopped down and consumed by people who don't care about them. Always hated the term "Human Resources."
|
|
|
|
|
No, M/F/R with reasonable limitations is not Turing complete, so it cannot cover everything, so there must be procedures that do other things than mapping, filtering or reducing. Besides, if you factor out the functions that you map over things, or the predicates, or the reduction function, those often have no M/F/R internally - they're more likely to be just some small arithmetic circuit over scalars (of course you could write arbitrary functions there..).
More practically, I'd say there are a couple of common patterns that are not secretly M or F or R (or some combination of them) in disguise:
- Arbitrary iteration (instead of over a collection). "Do this thing X times" is not a map, filter or reduce. Sure you could prepare a list of size X and then map over it, but that's a hack to force it to be done with the M/F/R paradigm, not a trick revealing that all loops are maps. Also if the iterations depend on each other, that's not a
map, maybe a fold. "Do this until [cond]" is even less of a M/F/R. I'm sure someone would like to argue at this point that such repetitions are merely parts of M/F/R if you look at a broader picture, but that is far from always true. Consider for example numerical algorithms that iterate until they converge, or simulations of systems that have to be evolved for X time steps. - Things that involve a "scatter". That's a lot of things. For example, inverting a permutation - again you can do some dirty hack, but the regular way is iterating
result[input[i]] = i for all valid i, which is not like an M/F/R or parts thereof. The "inner" code chooses where to write, so it's not just mapping some function over the array. - Almost anything that involves a more complicated data structure such as a heap, tree, disjoint sets, graphs (sometimes. some adjacency matrix algorithms do have an M/F/R structure). It will almost always rely on a specific ordering of side effects, you can't usually just apply operations to the data structure in a different order and get the same (or equivalent) results. Even if the global structure is "sort of like a
map", I would argue that the requirement to evaluate strictly in-order makes it not-a-map - proper maps should not have an ordering constraint between evaluations of the function it is applying.
That, I think, covers most non-trivial algorithms, except naive matrix multiplication and its generalizations (such as Floyd–Warshall).
|
|
|
|
|
Great points. Thank you for your detailed answer!
Marc
Latest Article - Create a Dockerized Python Fiddle Web App
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
|
|
|
|
|
I don't even know what those are, so I suspect I have never done them at all.
|
|
|
|
|
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
|
|
|
|
|
My first boss told me many years ago that all functions convert some input into some output and thats all there is, mind you he also told me if I wrote functions that were more than 11 lines long I was doing it wrong...
|
|
|
|
|
Generally speaking, your boss was right 
It's certainly a good way to look at code.
|
|
|
|
|
When it comes to the DB, it's all crud.
|
|
|
|
|
Not sure if it's only filter, map and reduce, but A LOT of programming is just working and transforming collections.
Which makes sense, because what I do (and what a lot of programming is) is collecting data, collections of things basically, and apply some statistics (mostly costs, profits, distances, weights, etc.)
|
|
|
|
|
Hmm. We lone wolves in the process control and embedded world will ignore your contention with quiet dignity and grace.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
Programming is a repetition of 3 things:
- map data from an external source to some kind of internal representation
- use algorithms to transform properties of the internal representation (change location, persistency, unit conversion, hierarchy..)
- filter and visualize the internal representation in some way
So no, I don't think map, filter and reduce are correct.
Map, filter, transform look better.. but that's just an optical illusion TBH.
In truth, you "map & transform" input into something with persistency and then "transform & filter" to get your output.
The skillful coder will only "map & transform" once per project, and "transform & filter" once per output device.
Just my 2 cents.
|
|
|
|
|
I thought this was settled with RPG:
Input
Output
Process (Compute)
|
|
|
|
|
Marc Clifton wrote: Would you say it's accurate that all programming is essentially the process of writing functions that implement map, filter, and reduce?
It was explained to me in the 1970s by those in the know that 90% of the work a computer does is sorting. Nowadays there are objects, classes, thunks and Lambdas, and Map/Filter/Reduce are just new ways of sorting.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
