Fun vs. Computer Science (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)

#181

Post by andrewflnr » Tue, Aug 29, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

alecbenzer wrote: post #171

andrewflnr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, in a similar way to how theoretical physics is mostly math. Math is the tool you're using, but the assumptions are all based on real-world observations.

I don't know about that; real world observations like what?

Like observations of what can and can't be computed by physical objects. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that things you prove about Turing machines are proofs about what you can compute in the real world, not just some abstract mathematical model.

Re: Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)

#182

Post by SomeCallMeTim » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 12:04 AM UTC

didibus wrote: post #176

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it? It's not "lowest common denominator" to ex…

1987, wow, I have to give you my respect. I think then Lisp is just not your thing, but I have to ackownledge that in 1987 they might have sucked. Realistically, the only one I like and know is Clojure and ClojureScript. Maybe I'd hate Common Lisp if I tried it. I know I don't like elisp, because it doesn't even use lexical scope by default, that's just a nightmare. I don't see the advantage of using it over using ot…

> I'd be just as fund of another language that would be functional, immutable, interactive and with smart abstractions.

You get all of the above with TypeScript except immutability. Pull in Lodash for extra functional sauce, or the functional variant of Lodash for increased composability. And the serialization format is the industry standard JSON.

Events are really a necessary tool. You're the first person I know of to complain of "event hell;" event-based programming is a key feature of modern operating systems and browsers and applications. I haven't used a CSP (it looks like a Lisp thing?), but it doesn't look like a full replacement for events, but rather streams? And there are functional stream libraries in JavaScript/TypeScript. [0]

I don't deny that having macros as a "sometimes feature" would be a good thing. I just can't stand the Lisp zillions of nested parenthesis. (Thankfully JavaScript callback-hell is also a thing of the past with async/await and Promises...I don't like zillions of levels of callbacks either).

I think once you have static types, immutability isn't as critical, but if you're set on it, there's always Immutable.js [1]

> On static vs dynamic type systems, I still don't know. I like types, they feel good to have, but I just don't feel they really help, I think they're a false sense of safety, and they just slow you down. That said, maybe they pay back in the long term maintainance, I'm still unsure though.

Technical debt earns compound interest over time. Static type systems let you zero out technical debt for almost no effort.

The only "slow you down" I get from TypeScript is defining declarations for libraries that are missing them. That's about 5 minutes to 15 minutes per library. That's an extremely low up front cost to pay, and everything else about TypeScript is faster (auto complete on object members) and better (refactoring is fast and easy enough that it's easy to "just do it" and not put it off until later).

[0] http://reactivex.io/ or https://github.com/cujojs/most/ are good examples.

[1] http://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/

Re: Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)

#183

Post by didibus » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #182

didibus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1987, wow, I have to give you my respect. I think then Lisp is just not your thing, but I have to ackownledge that in 1987 they might have sucked. Realistically, the only one I like and know is Clojure and ClojureScript. Maybe I'd hate Common Lisp if I tried it. I know I don't like elisp, because it doesn't even use lexical scope by default, that's just a nightmare. I don't see the advantage of using it over using ot…

> I'd be just as fund of another language that would be functional, immutable, interactive and with smart abstractions. You get all of the above with TypeScript except immutability. Pull in Lodash for extra functional sauce, or the functional variant of Lodash for increased composability. And the serialization format is the industry standard JSON. Events are really a necessary tool. You're the first person I know of…

Ya, I would probably be happy with TypeScript. How's the backend story? Is using it with node easy? Is there an interactive mode, or just quick transpilation?

Re: Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)

#184

Post by SomeCallMeTim » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #183

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be just as fund of another language that would be functional, immutable, interactive and with smart abstractions. You get all of the above with TypeScript except immutability. Pull in Lodash for extra functional sauce, or the functional variant of Lodash for increased composability. And the serialization format is the industry standard JSON. Events are really a necessary tool. You're the first person I know of…

Ya, I would probably be happy with TypeScript. How's the backend story? Is using it with node easy? Is there an interactive mode, or just quick transpilation?

It's pretty trivial to use with Node. You just need to have a source folder, set up your tsconfig.json file with your preferred options, and then run:

    tsc --watch

There's also an REPL for Node here:

    https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node

I find it a bit tricky to do anything complex in, though. Since TypeScript is mostly ES2015 anyway, when I want interactive anything I usually just use an ES2015 interpreter (like Node itself). The types usually make interactive stuff more challenging.