CP is fun

CP is fun is the title of this blog.
I needed to find quickly a title when I created the blog and I thought to this sentence. Ten years ago, when I gave talk at Informs, I always finished my talks by this sentence in order to convince people to be more interested in CP. Ten years later I am not sure that I was successfull, except if I consider that Irv Lustig told me once that he really enjoyes when he defines CP models.

When I read Pierre's posts, I really think that CP is fun because we can do a lot of things.
However, one sentence of Pierre drew my attention to optimization languages :

"When you take a close look at the line:

solver.Add(sum([10**(n-i-1)*x[i] for i in range(n)]) == nb)

It is difficult to argue that it is very far from dedicated optimization languages!"

 

I think the association of the concept of objects and libraries kill a lot of languages. Consider C++, do you want to have a kind of Lisp ? Use a library which manipulates lists like lisp! Do you want to use iterations with mapping functions ? Use  the stl or meta-programmation! In addition, you will benefit from all the advantages of the recent compilers and IDE. I think it is really difficult to obtain such a result with a dedicated language.

Thus, I strongly support Pierre.

 

However, this is not the best interface we can imagine, because I think that I found it.

Look at this website http://www.emotiv.com/

Being able to model and to solve some problems with CP while using their products will definitively be a very good way to prove that CP is really fun!