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I've come around to Julia's point of view that it makes more sense for the methods to be separate from the object they're acting on. I just wish Julia had a su

I've come around to Julia's point of view that it makes more sense for the methods to be separate from the object they're acting on. I just wish Julia had a succinct way of saying "This object needs to have implementations for functions X,Y,Z", rather than duck typing everything and just seeing if it works. Maybe it isn't too bad in practice I just don't like it when a function can fail because the implementation changed even though the type signature didn't. Anyway at the very least the approach of keeping methods separate helps to prevent objects that do not have any state and do not in fact represent any entity at all. Seriously who came up with naming a class "MyObjectHelper"? What on earth is it? It could represent literally anything. Does it even have state? And why?

crabmusket 5y ago
This is known as "multiple dispatch" or "multimethods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch
memco 5y ago
There was a presentation pycon 2021 describing how protocols enables better typing in several cases: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDDCKwP7QgQ&list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvYk1Y5P8kryoyd83L_0Uk5K&index=42 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDDCKwP7QgQ&list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvY.... They sound similar to what you describe in that the protocol allows you to describe the features of the thing you need and the type checker can then help you determine that the thing you need has those features. Doing this kind of feature detection allows you to check ahead of time whether a call is likely to succeed but especially for a language like python you still need runtime guards of some kind to limit the impact of unexpected cases.
mdoms 5y ago
Who is Julia?
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)
  - kloch 5y ago
    > Performance approaching that of statically-typed languages like C I might have to give this a try. Is there any language other than assembly that can beat the performance of C?
    - ummonk 5y ago
      Other zero-abstraction languages like Rust and Ada have comparable performance to C/C++. Fortran in particular, which has a lot of high performance code written in it, is sometimes faster than C due to optimization assumptions the compiler can make about Fortran code that it can’t about C code. Julia can be slower than these languages due to having a garbage collector and not being a statically compiled zero abstraction language (though it is designed to dynamically compile to overhead-free code), but for some tasks it can actually be way faster than normal implementations in C or assembly, due to its ability to dynamically compile code specific to the particular invocation of a function.
      - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        GC overhead only happens if you allocate. Julia makes it really easy to not allocate. Also 1.8 has some features coming that are able to delete some allocations if the data doesn't leak through escape analysis.
    - unnouinceput 5y ago
      It's not about the programming language per se, but the compiler/linker optimization(s). C/C++ have this magic aura of being fast because it has the most worked on compiler/linker. Once other programming languages come around that are attracting more programmers, then theirs compiler/linker will be the best from optimization point of view. Also CPU's/architecture's change all the time so even if now C/C++ have the best on classic x86-64, that can change if a better CPU with a different opcode comes along. I believe this will happen in 10 years where we'll see quantum CPU's with massive parallelism implemented at which time the entire 50-ish history of C/C++ will simply become obsolete and every language will actually have to start from zero in terms of transforming human language coding into CPU's opcode.
- hashimotonomora 5y ago
  Julia is quite hot right now.

crabmusket 5y ago

This is known as "multiple dispatch" or "multimethods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch

memco 5y ago

There was a presentation pycon 2021 describing how protocols enables better typing in several cases: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDDCKwP7QgQ&list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvYk1Y5P8kryoyd83L_0Uk5K&index=42 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDDCKwP7QgQ&list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvY.... They sound similar to what you describe in that the protocol allows you to describe the features of the thing you need and the type checker can then help you determine that the thing you need has those features. Doing this kind of feature detection allows you to check ahead of time whether a call is likely to succeed but especially for a language like python you still need runtime guards of some kind to limit the impact of unexpected cases.

mdoms 5y ago

Who is Julia?

unnouinceput 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)
- kloch 5y ago
  > Performance approaching that of statically-typed languages like C I might have to give this a try. Is there any language other than assembly that can beat the performance of C?
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Other zero-abstraction languages like Rust and Ada have comparable performance to C/C++. Fortran in particular, which has a lot of high performance code written in it, is sometimes faster than C due to optimization assumptions the compiler can make about Fortran code that it can’t about C code. Julia can be slower than these languages due to having a garbage collector and not being a statically compiled zero abstraction language (though it is designed to dynamically compile to overhead-free code), but for some tasks it can actually be way faster than normal implementations in C or assembly, due to its ability to dynamically compile code specific to the particular invocation of a function.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      GC overhead only happens if you allocate. Julia makes it really easy to not allocate. Also 1.8 has some features coming that are able to delete some allocations if the data doesn't leak through escape analysis.
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    It's not about the programming language per se, but the compiler/linker optimization(s). C/C++ have this magic aura of being fast because it has the most worked on compiler/linker. Once other programming languages come around that are attracting more programmers, then theirs compiler/linker will be the best from optimization point of view. Also CPU's/architecture's change all the time so even if now C/C++ have the best on classic x86-64, that can change if a better CPU with a different opcode comes along. I believe this will happen in 10 years where we'll see quantum CPU's with massive parallelism implemented at which time the entire 50-ish history of C/C++ will simply become obsolete and every language will actually have to start from zero in terms of transforming human language coding into CPU's opcode.
hashimotonomora 5y ago
Julia is quite hot right now.