5 ms·
With every passing year, I'm more and more convinced a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness is A Good Thing. A language where Joda is the most convenien
by arohner 17y ago
With every passing year, I'm more and more convinced a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness is A Good Thing. A language where Joda is the most convenient option, where all numerical quantities have units, and you have to make an explicit option to do "unsafe" things. Naturally, the goal of the language is to do as few unsafe operations as possible.
I think lisp is a good example: Most lisps have a full numeric tower that automatically converts between ints and bignums and ratios as appropriate. You don't have to think about the floating-point representation of 0.3 unless you wrote (double 0.3) in your code somewhere. Correctness should be the default, because it's much easier to trade some correctness for performance. Going the other way is much harder, and most people don't need performance.
This goes a long way, but now I notice the biggest obstacle is "legacy systems". The only time I get in trouble with the Clojure numeric tower is when I want to store a Ratio in the DB.
- LogicHoleFlaw 17y agoCan we get significant digit support too? That would make my life a happier place. edit: the joke about the horse mispelling "main()" by force of habit made me chuckle.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago>a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness I believe the word you're looking for is "pedantry". /pedant
- eru 17y agoYes, Haskell is not pedantic enough!
- omouse 17y agoWhat you're saying is that people will finally understand that thinking about a problem and preventing bugs before you begin is better than trying to fight fires afterwards.