Archivio mensile:Settembre 2015

Close the semantic gap

According to Wikipedia, “Scientists include theoreticians who mainly develop new models to explain existing data and experimentalists who mainly test models by making measurements – though in practice the division between these activities is not clear-cut, and many scientists perform both.” The domain-specific language that many scientists use to define their models is mathematics, and since the early days of computing science, the holy grail has been to close the semantic gap between scientific models and executable code as much as possible. It is becoming increasingly clear that all scientists are practicing applied mathematics, and some scientists, such as theoretical physicists, are behaviorally indistinguishable from pure mathematicians. The more we can make programming look like mathematics, the more helpful we make it to scientists and engineers.

Erik Meijer, prefazione a D. Syme, A. Granicz, A. Cisternino “Expert F#”, Apress 2007