Live data from Hacker News

Viewing profile — l_dopa

l_dopa

HN member
Joined
Mon, Oct 25, 2010, 5:10 PM UTC
HN karma
75
Public activity
51 items

About l_dopa

No profile information was provided.

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #36852167

    I always assumed this convention was just using "of" in the same sense as function composition. From wikipedia: > The notation g ∘ f is read as "g of f "...

  2. comment
    Comment #23519285

    > Classes as concept, are nothing more than extensible modules If you're talking about ML-style modules, that really can't be farther from the truth, both in theory and how they're…

  3. comment
    Comment #19715600

    That's not entirely accurate. Abstract data types (e.g. ML modules) can also be modeled as existential types and don't have the same problems. I think it's the particular combinati…

  4. comment
    Comment #16461701

    One big difference is that java interfaces can't contain member types. They describe the methods of one particular type. Imagine you could define an interface for an entire java pa…

  5. comment
    Comment #16461091

    Type checking, type abstraction. If you're willing to throw those out, you can "get the same thing" with structs and void pointers.

  6. comment
    Comment #16390941

    Actually, they're the "other side" of products types, which are sometimes called "records" or "structs". Maybe they're occasionally used to solve the same problem, but inheritance …

  7. comment
    Comment #15995509

    This is exactly what higher-order functions do, without the ad-hoc OO junk that's slightly different in every language.

  8. comment
    Comment #12437494

    > I haven't claimed that equational reasoning is limited to pure languages Sorry, I may have read that into your comment. > the code itself needs to be pure But that's also incorre…

  9. comment
    Comment #12435960

    This is a really annoying meme in "pop" FP. Equational reasoning isn't limited to "pure" languages. Effectful functions, as you probably are aware, are just functions of type A -> …

  10. comment
    Comment #12413169

    You're positing some new notion of complexity, without a definition, where lists are somehow fundamentally different than trees. Sorry, but that kind of claim requires more than ju…

  11. comment
    Comment #12402425

    Why is the complexity of parsing well-formed states from strings somehow interesting? If you generalize to trees and pick the right alphabet, suddenly every element of your datatyp…

  12. comment
    Comment #12165911

    Languages are not so much a collection of features ... If you want to define objects precisely, even just to have a language spec, they are absolutely made up of sums, products, re…

  13. comment
    Comment #12159167

    It sounds like we agree that lexically scoped immutable values are easier to understand, either precisely or with fuzzy metaphors. I'm not sure what "ideal" FP is or how it might h…

  14. comment
    Comment #12156087

    You're still, at some point, simulating the steps of some abstract machine in your head to understand what the debugger is telling you. The simplest case is replacing an expression…

  15. comment
    Comment #12155215

    "Pure" functional programming isn't the only alternative. There's plenty of benefit from just using a language with reasonable semantics (e.g. ML) that doesn't force you to contort…

  16. comment
    Comment #12109015

    The problem's not on your end -- a lot of these blogs are just junk, probably the vast majority of ones that fall under "advocacy". As far as I can tell, the author's objection to …

  17. comment
    Comment #12088012

    > The only plausible way to fix a bug in an ANN is to incorporate said bug in the training set My point was not something about manipulating weights directly vs. augmenting the tra…

  18. comment
    Comment #12086878

    Is knowing, for example, that there's a race triggered by a new optimization in compiler version X that happens under conditions Y and Z really a qualitatively different type of un…

  19. comment
    Comment #11373891

    Assuming you're in some client code that shouldn't rely on the implementation of m, it's an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_data_type

  20. comment
    Comment #11373701

    You're describing subtyping which, like modularity, does not require inheritance or really any other part of "OOP". I think that supports the article's point that C++, Java, etc. o…

  21. comment
    Comment #10495992

    People recognized ~20 years ago that, semantically, SSA is just reinventing lexical scope: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.3...

  22. comment
    Comment #10184515

    That's a very strange interpretation of Rice's theorem. Just because properties of computable functions are undecidable doesn't mean they somehow "can't be described by mathematics…

  23. comment
    Comment #10130850

    It was me[1] and I'm afraid you are still mistaken on a number of points: > The truth is that Haskell -- like all programming language -- has made a design choice, which was to bak…

  24. comment
    Comment #9636440

    This is exactly why a lot of formal methods work isn't, imho, terribly compelling. Something like http://vst.cs.princeton.edu/ has a much, much stronger case for enabling "100% cor…

  25. comment
    Comment #9525247

    Yes, we're talking about different things. I took the parent comment to mean that talking narrowly about "FP" as programming with pure functions isn't very useful any more. It may …