What programming languages most resemble math?

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May 28, 2021

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4 Options Considered

What programming languages most resemble math	Price	Site	License
-- OCaml	-	http://ocaml.org	LGPL version 2.1
-- Coq	-	-	-
-- Haskell	-	https://www.haskell.org/	-
-- Wolfram Mathematica	-	-	-

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Coq

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score 1 · Answer 1

OCaml

Site:http://ocaml.org

License:LGPL version 2.1

OS:Linux, Windows, OSX, BSD

Price:Open source (Free)

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score 3 · Answer 2

Haskell

Top Pro

Very few language constructs

The base language relies primarily on function application, with a very small amount of special-case syntax. Once you know the rules for function application, you know most of the language. See More

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Pro

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell's terseness also lends itself to very clear inline examples in textbooks, and makes it a pleasure to read through code even on a cellphone screen. See More

Top Pro

Mathematical consistency

As Haskell lends itself exceedingly well to abstraction, and borrows heavily from the culture of pure mathematics, it means that a lot more code conforms to very high-level abstractions. You can expect code from vastly different libraries to follow the same rules, and to be incredibly self-consistent. It's not uncommon to find that a parser library works the same way as a string library, which works the same way as a window manager library. This often means that getting familiar and productive with new libraries is often much easier than in other languages. See More

Top Pro

Functions curry automatically

Every function that expects more than one arguments is basically a function that returns a partially applied function. This is well-suited to function composition, elegance, and concision. See More

Top Pro

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Conciseness of Haskell lets us to write the expression on the whiteboard or paper and discuss with others easily. This is a strong benefit to learn FP over other languages. See More

Top Pro

Referentially transparent

Haskell's Purely Functional approach means that code is referentially transparent. This means that to read a function, one only needs to know its arguments. Code works the same way that expressions work in Algebra class. There's no need to read the whole source code to determine if there's some subtle reference to some mutable state, and no worries about someone writing a "getter" that also mutates the object it's called on. Functions are all directly testable in the REPL, and there's no need to remember to call methods in a certain order to properly initialize an object. No breakage of encapsulation, and no leaky abstractions. See More

Top Pro

Powerful categorical abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language. See More

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score 1 · Answer 3

Wolfram Mathematica

Top Pro

Lots of functionality

Top Pro

Coherent API over different domains

Top Pro

Very mature

Wolfram Mathematica has been around for a long time without any major changes in the basic design. See More

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What programming languages most resemble math?

4 Options Considered

OCaml

My Recommendation for OCaml

My Recommendation for OCaml

Coq

My Recommendation for Coq

My Recommendation for Coq

Haskell

My Recommendation for Haskell

My Recommendation for Haskell

Very few language constructs

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

Easy to read

Mathematical consistency

Functions curry automatically

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Referentially transparent

Powerful categorical abstractions

Wolfram Mathematica

My Recommendation for Wolfram Mathematica

My Recommendation for Wolfram Mathematica

Lots of functionality

Coherent API over different domains

Very mature

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