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Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

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Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#61

Post by datadrivenangel »

seg_lol wrote: post #37
mjburgess wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced your L/S dichotomy applies. The concern there is that the natural world (or some objective target domain) has natural joints, and the job of the scientist (, philosopher, et al.) is to uncover those joints. You want to keep 'hair splitting' until the finest bones of reality are clear, then grouping hairs up into lumps, so their joints and connections are clear. The debate is whether the present cate…

> I'm not convinced your L/S dichotomy applies. Proceeds to urm actually split.

All ontologies are false. But some are useful.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#62

Post by ethmarks »

mjburgess wrote: post #27
jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

I'm not convinced your L/S dichotomy applies. The concern there is that the natural world (or some objective target domain) has natural joints, and the job of the scientist (, philosopher, et al.) is to uncover those joints. You want to keep 'hair splitting' until the finest bones of reality are clear, then grouping hairs up into lumps, so their joints and connections are clear. The debate is whether the present cate…

Ahh, so you're a meta-splitter.

https://xkcd.com/2518/

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#63

Post by ethmarks »

AlienRobot wrote: post #32
jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

That's very interesting! Splitters make more sense to me since different things should be categorized differently. However, I believe a major problem in modern computing is when the splitter becomes an "abstraction-splitter." For example, take the mouse. The mouse is used to control the mouse cursor, and that's very easy to understand. But we also have other devices that can control the mouse cursor, such as the styl…

Doesn't it make sense to use words that mean what you're using them to mean?

By your logic I could use the term "apple" to describe apples, oranges, limes, and all other fruit because they all behave in much the same ways that apples do. But that's silly because there are differences between apples and oranges [citation needed]. If you want to describe both apples and oranges, the word for that is "fruit", not "apple".

Using a touchscreen is less precise than using a mouse. If the user is using a touchscreen, buttons need to be bigger to accommodate for the user's lack of input precision. So doesn't it make sense to distinguish between mice and touchscreens? If all you care about is "thing that acts like a mouse", the word for that is "pointing device", not "mouse".

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#64

Post by oersted »

kragen wrote: post #25
oersted wrote: post #21

I don't understand what the issue is: a transpiler is a compiler that outputs in a language that human programmers use. It's good to be aware of that from an engineering standpoint, because the host language will have significantly different limitations, interoperability and ecosystem, compared to regular binary or some VM byte-code. Also, I believe that they are meaningfully different in terms of compiler architectu…

GCC outputs textual GNU assembly language, in which I have written, for example, a web server, a Tetris game, a Forth interpreter, and an interpreter for an object-oriented language with pattern-matching. Perhaps you are under the illusion that I am not a human programmer because this is some kind of superhuman feat, but to me it seems easier than programming in high-level languages. It just takes longer. I think tha…

Of course I'm aware of this, I've written some assembly too, most definitions are leaky. And if GNU assembly had wide adoption among programmers right now and an ecosystem around it, then some people might also call GCC a transpiler (in that specific mode, which is not the default), if they care about the fact that it outputs in a language that they may read or write by hand comfortably.

They also called C a high-level language at that time. There was also more emphasis on the distinction between assemblers and compilers. Indeed, they may have used the word compiler more in the sense we use transpiler now, I'm sure people were also saying that it was just a fancy assembler. Terminology shifts.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#65

Post by jasode »

mjburgess wrote: post #27
jasode wrote: post #16

Whenever someone argues the uselessness or redundancy of a particular word, a helpful framework to understand their perspective is "Lumpers vs Splitters" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters An extreme caricature example of a "lumper" would just use the word "computer" to label all Turing Complete devices with logic gates. In that mindset, having a bunch of different words like "mainframe" , "pc" , "…

I'm not convinced your L/S dichotomy applies. The concern there is that the natural world (or some objective target domain) has natural joints, and the job of the scientist (, philosopher, et al.) is to uncover those joints. You want to keep 'hair splitting' until the finest bones of reality are clear, then grouping hairs up into lumps, so their joints and connections are clear. The debate is whether the present cate…

> i think the apparent 'lumper' is just a person ignorant of classification scheme offered, or at least, ignorant of what property it purports to capture.

>In each case there is a real objective distinction

No, Lumper-vs-Splitter doesn't simply boil down to plain ignorance. The L/S debate in the most sophisticated sense involves participants who actually know the proposed classifications but _chooses_ to discount them.

Here's another old example of a "transpiler" disagreement subthread where all 4 commenters actually know the distinctions of what that word is trying to capture but 3-out-of-4 still think that extra word is unnecessary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160415

Lumping-vs-Splitting is more about emphasis vs de-emphasis via the UI of language. I.e. "I do actually see the extra distinctions you're making but I don't elevate that difference to require a separate word/category."

The _choice_ by different users of language to encode the difference into another distinct word is subjective not objective.

Another example could be the term "social media". There's the seemingly weekly thread where somebody proclaims, "I quit all social media" and then there's the reply of "Do you consider HN to be social media?". Both the "yes" and "no" sides already know and can enumerate how Facebook works differently than HN so "ignorance of differences" of each website is not the root of the L/S. It's subjective for the particular person to lump in HN with "social media" because the differences don't matter. Likewise, it's subjective for another person to split HN as separate from social media because the differences do matter.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#66

Post by ethmarks »

ssrc wrote: post #22
goranmoomin wrote: post #6

IMO: Transpilers are compilers, but not all compilers are transpilers. In my book, transpilers are compilers that consume a programming language and target human-readable code, to be consumed by another compiler or interpreter (either by itself, or to be integrated in other projects). i.e. the TypeScript compiler is a transpiler from TS to JS, the Nim compiler is a transpiler from Nim to C, and so on. I guess if you…

For me, the "human-readable" part is key. It's not just that the output is e.g. javascript, but that it is more or less human-readable with about the same organization as the original code. If you implement SKI combinators, or three-address instructions, as functions in javascript, and that's the output of your compiler, I would not call that a transpiler.

Would it still count as a transpiler if it minifies the code at the end?

For example, most SCSS workflows I've worked with converert SCSS source code into minified CSS, which is pretty difficult for a human to read. But I think that SCSS => CSS still counts as transpiling.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#67

Post by krapp »

oersted wrote: post #21

I don't understand what the issue is: a transpiler is a compiler that outputs in a language that human programmers use. It's good to be aware of that from an engineering standpoint, because the host language will have significantly different limitations, interoperability and ecosystem, compared to regular binary or some VM byte-code. Also, I believe that they are meaningfully different in terms of compiler architectu…

The issue is confused because of Javascript and the trend to consider Javascript "bytecode for the web" because it is primarily "compiled" from other languages, rather than being considered a language in its own right.

I've gotten into arguments with people who refuse to accept that there is any difference worth considering between javascript and bytecode or assembly. From that perspective, the difference between a "transpiler" and a "compiler" is just aesthetics.

Re: Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)

#69

Post by oersted »

krapp wrote: post #67
oersted wrote: post #21

I don't understand what the issue is: a transpiler is a compiler that outputs in a language that human programmers use. It's good to be aware of that from an engineering standpoint, because the host language will have significantly different limitations, interoperability and ecosystem, compared to regular binary or some VM byte-code. Also, I believe that they are meaningfully different in terms of compiler architectu…

The issue is confused because of Javascript and the trend to consider Javascript "bytecode for the web" because it is primarily "compiled" from other languages, rather than being considered a language in its own right. I've gotten into arguments with people who refuse to accept that there is any difference worth considering between javascript and bytecode or assembly. From that perspective, the difference between a "…

I do think you are right, the concept is not common outside of the JS ecosystem to be fair. Indeed, it probably wouldn't make much sense to transpile in the first place, if it wasn't for these browser limitations. People would just make fully new languages, and it is starting to happen with WebAssembly.

And the ecosystem of JVM and BEAM hosted languages does make the concept even murkier.

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