Comment by tines

Comment by tines 11 days ago

5 replies

In isolation, isn't the quote prima facie so bad and so wrong though? We think of collections of things as single things constantly. A human is a collection of body parts, body parts are collections of chemicals, chemicals are collections of molecules, molecules are collections of atoms... and yet at each level we think of those collections as being single things. Not being able to do that is just... absurd.

The project looks awesome though.

CrimsonCape 11 days ago

Agreed. Type systems are nearly always "temporal" yet are too simply designed to address that.

"Temporal" to mean that at any given slice of time during a running application all objects have a signature that matches a type.

Yet most programming languages only allow compile-time analysis and "runtime" is treated as monolithic "we can't know at this point anything about types"

devin 11 days ago

I think maybe it is intended as a critique of systems where the individual parts don't compose or scale particularly well, where it feels sort of hollow to call it a "system" because of how uncoordinated and inefficient it is at the "single things" layer.

stevage 10 days ago

I think the point is that a body is obviously and intuitively a thing, and doesn't need any pretending. Whereas take something like a marketing brand that has been spread too thin over a bunch of disparate products, everyone has to pretend really hard that it is one thing.

jjslocum3 10 days ago

Yes! In programming speak, you're talking about levels of abstraction.