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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

That's the basis of an essay I'm writing. Derivation of FP from ImpP by progressive enhancement through mutation avoidance.

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That sounds really interesting, there was a similar approach (albeit somewhat implicit rather than explicit) in the Programming Languages Coursera course.

Where do you think I would be able to read the essay when it's complete? Will there be a great deal of mathematics in there? (I have a poor/loose grasp of anything past high school mathematics, barring algorithms).

If I ever finish it I'll tweet it. There won't be a lot, I'm a barely educated noob with distate for out of reach abstraction. And I see a simple migration path from imperative to functional. If you have no college education about programming languages it might be interesting to test if my ideas are worth reading and actually effective.

You might be interested in reading "Teaching Programming with the Kernel Language Approach" by Van Roy and Haridi.

Is it different from CTM ?

ps: just read this https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/fdpefinalweb.pdf

it seem they extends the SICP approach, substitution -> state | concurrency ...

I planned to do the opposite. state -> subst

They're very close to each other, the paper just presents the method directly, whereas the CTM is a book-length application of the method.

Yeah, I guess it is in the opposite direction. I was mostly thinking in terms of describing a language in terms of another via 'progressive enhancement'.

Yeah, the idea is similar, but I really meant to show how similar FP was to ImP by starting from what's familiar to non FP programmers.

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