3 ms·

I don't take issue with the naming but with the names that feel a bit beyond my ken. "Erased" makes sense when explained but not before. "Reified" is a word I s

• klodolph 1y ago
  Another shrug, but part of it is that the PL community (programming language community) is pretty deep into its own jargon that doesn’t have as much overlap as you might think, with other subfields of computer science. People describe a type system as “not well-founded” or “unsound” and those are specific jabs at the axioms, and people talk about “system F” or “type erasure” or “reification”. Polymorphism can be “ad-hoc” or “parametric”, and type parameters can be invariant, covariant, and contravariant. It’s just a lot of jargon and I think the main reason it’s not intuitive to people outside the right fields is that the actual concepts are mostly unfamiliar.
  • bawolff 1y ago
    > Another shrug, but part of it is that the PL community (programming language community) is pretty deep into its own jargon that doesn’t have as much overlap as you might think, with other subfields of computer science. The word reified dates back to the 1800s. It isn't the most common word, but it also definitely wasn't invented by the programming language community.
    • peterfirefly 1y ago
      It was (and is) used a lot by philosophers and there was a large overlap between a certain class of philosophers and a certain class of mathematicians who developed early type theory. Any type theorist who knows his literature will run into reification very early on.