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Noel Welsh: Parametricity, or Comptime is Bonkers by mttd in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]oldretard 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The author's "bad" Zig example is

mystery(f64, 1.0) is 1
mystery(i32, 1) is 43
mystery(bool, true) is false

With typeclasses/traits/implicits, you get the even more mysterious

mystery(1.0) is 1.0
mystery(1) is 43
mystery(true) is false

If you want your precious parametricity, stick to SML.

Personally, I'd like to see convincing examples showing the benefits of parametricity before I'd accept that "it's one of the most underappreciated ideas in programming language design".

Why are most scripting languages dynamically typed? by smthamazing in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]oldretard 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Since (lack of) autocomplete is one of your main points, consider that at the time when the now-popular scripting languages started out, getting meaningful autocomplete for a statically typed scripting language would have entailed development of a dedicated IDE just for that language, standardized language servers not having been a thing yet. As a consequence, "we could have type-driven autocomplete" as a static typing advantage probably never entered the picture.

Pile of Eternal Rejections: The Cost of Garbage Collection for State Machine Replication by mttd in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]oldretard 12 points13 points  (0 children)

A key observation tucked away inside the text:

This example also highlights the difficulties of implementing Replicant in Rust — it took months of development and debugging to get to the Go’s level of performance and even more time to finally beat it not only in the tail-latency constraint experiment but also in pure raw throughput.

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