3 ms·

> Question is, can anyone design & implement a language that would have all of that, and still be readable and understandable to a common programmer No, becaus

> Question is, can anyone design & implement a language that would have all of that, and still be readable and understandable to a common programmer No, because exception handling and the answer to "what type are these data?" are product questions. Hard questions that no one really wants to work out because what if our customer base wants something completely different in 6 months? This is largely reflected in cloud providers being unwilling/unable to provide account spend caps: what is a sane response once the budget goes over? AWS can't tell you; only you can define it. (This isn't to say "there's nothing AWS can do for you here" -- they could but won't for other reasons). Python is the largest, common language that can support gradual checking systems being added in over time, and mypy has outlined a great framework for doing just that. But it's not a silver bullet and can't be because the problems are cultural, not mathematic. Either spend the time working out what you want your software to do, or don't. But don't argue "strictness" is "correctness".

fatbird 5y ago
But don't argue "strictness" is "correctness" I feel my mind expanding right now the same way I did when I first heard "concurrency and parallelism aren't the same thing".
akavel 5y ago
Hm; I guess when being in talks with a company using the language, assuming the pragmas idea I elaborated in a cousin comment, I'd then be asking questions like: "Is your codebase any=default or any=forbidden? What percentage of it is any=allowed?" (Instead of the current: "are you using JS, Go, or Rust?") Notably, in my particular case, what you say is a problem is exactly why I want it: because when writing the PoC, I don't really know what I'm doing yet; and I want to only sketch it. Once I see the sketch and it looks like the general idea has some promise, I want to "grab the pen and start drawing" - i.e. start diving into the nitty-gritty dark corners of ugly interactions, corner cases, & stability, as a way of better understanding & exploring my domain/project/idea (specifically, using the compiler as a tool that is forcing me to do that, by asking me difficult questions). And I may want it graded in various areas of my codebase: some are super unimportant or still being explored, and I'm ok having them explicitly marked as "sketchy"; others are where I really care about extreme security, so want full prover power, and I want to know their exact boundaries too; finally, some are the "more or less know what I'm doing, but not life-critical" to bigger or lesser extent; notably with some small corners marked with an explicit "caution: here be dragons" `unsafe` (I mean, `any=allowed`) yellow tape.

fatbird 5y ago

But don't argue "strictness" is "correctness" I feel my mind expanding right now the same way I did when I first heard "concurrency and parallelism aren't the same thing".

akavel 5y ago

Hm; I guess when being in talks with a company using the language, assuming the pragmas idea I elaborated in a cousin comment, I'd then be asking questions like: "Is your codebase any=default or any=forbidden? What percentage of it is any=allowed?" (Instead of the current: "are you using JS, Go, or Rust?") Notably, in my particular case, what you say is a problem is exactly why I want it: because when writing the PoC, I don't really know what I'm doing yet; and I want to only sketch it. Once I see the sketch and it looks like the general idea has some promise, I want to "grab the pen and start drawing" - i.e. start diving into the nitty-gritty dark corners of ugly interactions, corner cases, & stability, as a way of better understanding & exploring my domain/project/idea (specifically, using the compiler as a tool that is forcing me to do that, by asking me difficult questions). And I may want it graded in various areas of my codebase: some are super unimportant or still being explored, and I'm ok having them explicitly marked as "sketchy"; others are where I really care about extreme security, so want full prover power, and I want to know their exact boundaries too; finally, some are the "more or less know what I'm doing, but not life-critical" to bigger or lesser extent; notably with some small corners marked with an explicit "caution: here be dragons" `unsafe` (I mean, `any=allowed`) yellow tape.