[loup-vaillant]

And you are making an equally huge mistake: that thinking in terms of sets, mappings, graphs, combinators, etc doesn't help. It does. And if a programmer is incapable of understanding those concepts, he should learn them.

The fact is, we shouldn't adapt computers to our thinking, nor our thinking to computers. We should adapt both to our problems.

[blub]

Sure it helps, but that's not what derefr said. He said that any other type of thinking is a "crutch" and that the ideal of thinking is "thinking in terms of sets, mappings, graphs, combinators, etc".

By the way, "sets, mappings, graphs, combinators" is a pretty strange definition for a set. The element descriptions are vague and some of them seem unrelated to the others. That may be mathematically correct, but it doesn't make for a great argument.

[loup-vaillant]

OK, I misread you.

That said, I tested both OO an FP, and my current opinion is that thinking more mathematically (in terms of sets, mappings…), almost always yields smaller designs, which are almost always more flexible and more efficient.

> By the way, "sets, mappings, graphs, combinators" is a pretty strange definition for a set. The element descriptions are vague and some of them seem unrelated to the others. That may be mathematically correct, but it doesn't make for a great argument.

I don't understand you here. Derefr didn't make any mathematical statement. He didn't described the concepts, he named them. The four items he mentioned are related. And why should they, anyway? The way I see it, Derefr just made a statement, not an argument.