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> I don't see how your series or resistor examples are particularly relevant: neither mathematical nor physical facts are human inventions. Mathematical facts

> I don't see how your series or resistor examples are particularly relevant: neither mathematical nor physical facts are human inventions. Mathematical facts are a very human invention, just like the transistor. I picked calculus precisely because intuition based on physical observation gives the wrong answer nine times out of ten. > assuming everyone is a robot who's memorised all corner cases of their tools But this is not a corner case! I'm not talking about an obscure quirk (God knows how many C has!), this is literally syntax, the first thing you learn about a language!

dbaupp 9y ago
> transistor (Whoops, but my point still stands just as much.) > Mathematical facts are a very human invention, just like the transistor. I picked calculus precisely because intuition based on physical observation gives the wrong answer nine times out of ten. I think I didn't convey my point very well: humans and their intuitions have no influence over the value of the mathematical series 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + ... nor do we have any influence over the behaviour and interactions of certain doped (etc.) silicon. Both of these just are, outside the influence of humans. Certainly, for the former, we have control over the syntax we use ("the packaging")/how we write it down, but, say, changing what "1" means changes the series to a different object. In any case, control over the syntax is exactly like a programming language, and indeed, mathematical notation is very similar and it's great when people have sympathy for the reader's intuition (and their own) when designing new instances. (The ⌈x⌉ notation for the ceiling of x is a nice example of this working well.) Similarly for a transistor, humans can decide how we put the bits of silicon together, and what wires we connect up, but we absolutely cannot decide the fundamental principles that make them work. This means, if we want a certain behaviour, we're limited by what physics can do. > But this is not a corner case! I'm not talking about an obscure quirk (God knows how many C has!), this is literally syntax, the first thing you learn about a language! Yes, you're right `sizeof(foo)` is syntax... that looks a lot like `function(foo)` but behaves differently with respect to any side-effects in foo. As I said above, I do actually think this was a reasonable choice on C's part, but it seems silly to, seemingly, dismiss any possibility that it could be confusing & that maybe future languages/language designers should avoid doing this (or at least explicitly think about the choice they're making) and instead just repeat RTFM over and over.

dbaupp 9y ago

> transistor (Whoops, but my point still stands just as much.) > Mathematical facts are a very human invention, just like the transistor. I picked calculus precisely because intuition based on physical observation gives the wrong answer nine times out of ten. I think I didn't convey my point very well: humans and their intuitions have no influence over the value of the mathematical series 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + ... nor do we have any influence over the behaviour and interactions of certain doped (etc.) silicon. Both of these just are, outside the influence of humans. Certainly, for the former, we have control over the syntax we use ("the packaging")/how we write it down, but, say, changing what "1" means changes the series to a different object. In any case, control over the syntax is exactly like a programming language, and indeed, mathematical notation is very similar and it's great when people have sympathy for the reader's intuition (and their own) when designing new instances. (The ⌈x⌉ notation for the ceiling of x is a nice example of this working well.) Similarly for a transistor, humans can decide how we put the bits of silicon together, and what wires we connect up, but we absolutely cannot decide the fundamental principles that make them work. This means, if we want a certain behaviour, we're limited by what physics can do. > But this is not a corner case! I'm not talking about an obscure quirk (God knows how many C has!), this is literally syntax, the first thing you learn about a language! Yes, you're right `sizeof(foo)` is syntax... that looks a lot like `function(foo)` but behaves differently with respect to any side-effects in foo. As I said above, I do actually think this was a reasonable choice on C's part, but it seems silly to, seemingly, dismiss any possibility that it could be confusing & that maybe future languages/language designers should avoid doing this (or at least explicitly think about the choice they're making) and instead just repeat RTFM over and over.