jonsterling

I wish to clarify this comment; what I said above is strictly correct, but several people have drawn an undesirable conclusion from it which leads me to find a clarification necessary.

It is not the case that trolling English speakers was the primary motivation of Huet. My understanding is that the trolling was a side-benefit to a name he would have chosen regardless of whether it evinced the double entendre.

In english at least, we call this a “double entendre” ;-)

Obviously the very purpose of double entendres is to troll those who will get the second meaning. duh!

To be clear, this name was chosen by the creator of Coq, Gerard Huet, with the intention of trolling. It wasn't an innocent French word.

There's nothing wrong with mutable data structures from a type soundness perspective. We know how to do it properly. But you need to get the type system right in order to include mutable data structures; often people get this wrong, and it leads to all sorts of frustration...

TypeScript, the language which only just this month added a flag to turn off their completely incorrect subtyping rules for functions! A flag!

I remember reporting this bug years ago, and they said it was "by design, since JS programmers prefer to think of functions as covariant in their input". Well, I prefer to think of 2+2 as equalling 5.

Not only this, but strangely it doesn't use standard methods or names in the categorical understanding of computer science. All this business about "CompFunc" as a category of sets and computable functions, but I see nothing about partial combinatory algebras or realizability.

For some of my documents which use opentype fonts, the difference is by a factor of 20-30 between xelatex and lualatex.

I think it is not just a minority opinion, but just plain wrong.

I have to admit I have no idea what racket is, nor did I do much more than scan the article.

why have you commented then? Mao Zedong had a dope saying about this, "No investigation, no right to speak!"

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One answer to your questions, btw, is that macros are useful and interesting regardless of what kind of type system you have. Haskell has something called Template Haskell, which is really quite bad for a number of reasons, but it is certainly possible to imagine a version of Haskell with a well-designed macro system. It just so happens that Racket has an exceptionally well-designed macro system, so the partnership of the two ideas is very plausible and scientifically interesting.

Macros and types are not in opposition. However, macros induce a notion of PHASE which is not usually accounted for in type systems, though it may be possible to account for this in a principled/type-theoretic way using ideas from modal logic and kripke semantics.

You went straight from saying, “Don't assume I'm a running dog!” to literally proving that you are a running dog! So cool.

This is not true. Some of the best papers ever, I have benefited from reading many times, more than three.

You (and I) are not in the target audience for those books. She does very serious mathematics, which should be defended; she gave a very nice talk on Trimble n-categories to my research group on Friday, for instance.

Standard ML. I develop proof assistants.

Sorry for my harsh comment; here's what I'm thinking of...

In math, you are dealing with many different kinds of object, not just numbers. In fact, one of the big realizations that led to modern mathematics is that not all mathematical objects can even be coded as numbers!

Your remark about "arrow" being more general than function is correct; but functions do not map only between sets of numbers, but between arbitrary sets, some of which contain elements that are not numbers, or even encodable as such.

wtf are you on about? That is not how math works.

Folks unironically using the term "thought leader" are one of the reasons people dislike Twitter...

Hmm, I think you should aim for sentences to be correct on their own and be arranged such that understanding & precision is built incrementally (in the way you suggest). This is harder, but that's what good writing does---I want my "simplified" parts to be real approximations of the precise parts; we mustn't settle for the simplifications failing to approximate the precise versions.

It may be easy for experts to avoid getting confused by a literally false claim, which is clarified in the next paragraph. But your paper will often be read by people who are not experts in the paper's topic, so some will end up being confused by this.

It's stressful for me to read that kind of paper, since it causes a lot of cognitive dissonance as you read! Maybe it's not like that for everyone, but I prefer to read papers that don't use the approach you appear to suggest.

That paper is just a bit of bureaucracy which demonstrates that total programs behave the same in a total language as when they are embedded into a partial language (which is an intuitive result, and it's nice that they worked out the details!). It's also a nice demonstration of the logical relations proof technique.

But sadly this paper is pulled out all the time by people who I suspect don't understand what is going on, to justify sleight of hand & dodgy reasoning which has little to do with the result in the paper. (Not claiming that's what's happening in the above comment! But I bristle a bit when I see this paper come up in amateur/Haskell circles.)

This is like one of those evil spirits/creatures that changes shape while you are wrestling with it!

still exactly like this

F# doesn't even have modules. Not really in the SML spirit—it's like if you combined Classic/LCF ML from the 1970s with C#.

but I've found that what I get from a community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with what I put into it.

Huh? The comment I am criticizing in this thread is not directed at me, and has nothing to do with me. Seems a bit of a stretch to think that I caused it by my attitude, etc. It's a general characteristic of the HN community, not caused or sparked at all by my criticism or engagement.

Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument.

Apologies---my intention was to signal that I wasn't interested in escalating the conversation or causing unpleasantness. I am completely happy to leave the last word to you.

Re "vandalism" and "being part of the community", thanks for your thoughts. I don't see myself at all as part of this community, but I do occasionally comment in it and on it. How is that possible? HN is a community of hackers and startup doers, and I once really was part of that (when I had the misfortune of being employed by a YC company); but a community is defined not just by collocation but by shared values & shared norms. Completely understandable if you'd rather I just buzzed off!

I understand the remainder of your comments, but I don't agree with them at all; to me, it is quite similar to the old bourgeois-liberal argument against antifa action, "you're just as bad as them!". In any case, it's completely understandable how & why you think that way, and I'm not interested in having a fight about it.

I will simply take the position that it is worse to arrogantly claim instant expertise than it is to (snarkily) criticize arrogance.

Chief, this was not the cultural revolution, this was the Great Leap Forward. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started in 1966.

I suppose with respect to this particular community, I am most likely to take a position similar to that of Ra's al Ghul toward Gotham in Batman Begins...

By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense), than it is for a HN member to attack another?

Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here (as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down.

I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.

I really wonder how "snarky attack that pushes back against glib dismissal" is somehow worse than "snarky attack which glibly dismisses the work of a professional philosopher". Do you have any clarification of your opinion?

Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher!

Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).

My last day is in just over two weeks! Starting my PhD in type theory at CMU.

This is maybe the stupidest HN comment I've ever seen...

Everything likely is done out of fear—the kind of fear where you barf of dialectics at the proletarian youth league meeting to avoid having a struggle session in your honor.