this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 25 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

PID control is the classic example, but at a far enough abstraction any looping algorithm can be argued to be an implementation of the concepts underpinning calculus. If you're ever doing any statistical analysis or anything in game design having to do with motion, those are both calculus too. Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs, and any string manipulation or Regex is going to be built on lambda calculus (though a very correct argument can be made that literally all computer science is built of lambda calculus so that might be cheating to include it)

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Lambda calculus has no relation to calculus calculus, though.

Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs

Lol, I like that. I mean, there's more calculus-y things, but it's kind of unusual in that you can't really interpret the non-calculus aspects of a neural net.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Lambda calculus has no relation to calculus calculus

I wanna fight your math teachers. No seriously, what did they tell you calculus is if it's got nothing in common with lambda calculus?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Is there some connection I've just been missing? It's a pretty straight rewriting system, it seems Newton wouldn't have had much use for it.

Lot's of things get called "calculus". Originally, calculus calculus was "the infinitesimal calculus" IIRC.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I think the issue here might be the overloading of terms - lambda calculus is both the system of notation and the common name for the conceptual underpinnings of computational theory. While there is little to no similarity between the abstracted study of change over a domain and a notational system, the idea of function composition or continuous function theory (or even just computation as a concept) are all closely related with basic concepts from "calculus calculus" like limit theory and integral progression.

edit: clarity