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How is it premature abstraction if it takes zero extra lines of code to support it and have it optimized? That's kind of the beauty of Julia.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It didn’t require zero lines of code. It required a huge amount of backend code to set up the abstraction and make lots of built-in types that adhere to the abstraction. And in cases when the abstraction fails to offer the exact type of extensibility needed (which is most of the time unless you’re authoring yet another highly abstracted library that can tie its use cases to that underlying abstraction, which is never in practice), then it was wasted effort, and “no overhead” is a false description, because you still have to dig into the guts of all the stuff that gets auto-generated if you plugged into the abstraction and change the mechanism of how it gets auto-generated for your special case, or else (usually easier), just write separate data structures outside of the abstraction vortex and have a few small converters or helpers that marshal your custom data type into and out of the abstraction for the really tiny anount of auto-generated features that actually matter to the use case. The “but it requires zero lines of code” thing is so misleading once you hit real use cases where the choices of how the abstraction auto-generates things end up being unusable for some specific situation.
- ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
  Right here we have a classic case of someone on the internet anonymously saying something is impossible to do while there are many many examples of exactly this working. I recommend readers of these posts to ignore the FUD and do some Google searches to look through some Julia code repositories to see it in action. There are some great tutorials and fact-based discussions out there that can lead you to some useful examples with tricks you can employ in your own code.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    It looks like you are just posting knee-jerk defensive posts about julia I guess. Whatever this is, it’s clearly not related to my earlier comments in the thread. What are you talking about? Where did I say any of this was not possible? It’s obviously possible. It just turns out to be bad when you do it. It causes problems that the company line memo about zero overhead never is upfront about.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

It didn’t require zero lines of code. It required a huge amount of backend code to set up the abstraction and make lots of built-in types that adhere to the abstraction. And in cases when the abstraction fails to offer the exact type of extensibility needed (which is most of the time unless you’re authoring yet another highly abstracted library that can tie its use cases to that underlying abstraction, which is never in practice), then it was wasted effort, and “no overhead” is a false description, because you still have to dig into the guts of all the stuff that gets auto-generated if you plugged into the abstraction and change the mechanism of how it gets auto-generated for your special case, or else (usually easier), just write separate data structures outside of the abstraction vortex and have a few small converters or helpers that marshal your custom data type into and out of the abstraction for the really tiny anount of auto-generated features that actually matter to the use case. The “but it requires zero lines of code” thing is so misleading once you hit real use cases where the choices of how the abstraction auto-generates things end up being unusable for some specific situation.

ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
Right here we have a classic case of someone on the internet anonymously saying something is impossible to do while there are many many examples of exactly this working. I recommend readers of these posts to ignore the FUD and do some Google searches to look through some Julia code repositories to see it in action. There are some great tutorials and fact-based discussions out there that can lead you to some useful examples with tricks you can employ in your own code.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  It looks like you are just posting knee-jerk defensive posts about julia I guess. Whatever this is, it’s clearly not related to my earlier comments in the thread. What are you talking about? Where did I say any of this was not possible? It’s obviously possible. It just turns out to be bad when you do it. It causes problems that the company line memo about zero overhead never is upfront about.