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“By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad choice
by microcolonel 13y ago
“By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs. This is a bad practice that is very deeply ingrained.”
This is like saying that the sharp blades on scissors (diverse numeric types) make them prone to causing bodily harm to surrounding people(errors due to constraints of types), then concluding that we should replace all scissors (numeric types) with those rounded plastic scissors(dec64 play dough floats) which come with a play dough set.
Every time somebody has the idea that by deluding developers more we can save them trouble and make them feel safer, we pat that person on the back and follow their recipe.
Then two years later there's a HN post about why you really shouldn't be doing whatever was prescribed.