Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
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Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
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Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#2> defunctionalization, a transformation that replaces higher-order functions with equivalent first-order ones.
For anyone else who got nothing from the title.
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#3[deleted]
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#4> defunctionalization, a transformation that replaces higher-order functions with equivalent first-order ones. For anyone else who got nothing from the title.
[deleted]
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#5The authors work seems very interesting, and could maybe lead to the automatic generation of a language server with semantic query and refactoring capabilities, for any programming language. Or portable (in the 'language to language' sense) static analysis tools or interpreters or symbolic execution tools...
Just wondering (out loud) how you formalize language semantics so they can be consumed... I know about grammar formalisms (bnf/ebnf, antlr, peach/xsd/asn.1...) but what is the lingua franca of language semantics? Except for latex papers...
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#6> For instance, I teach programmers to tune out the noise of refactoring catalogs and learn how most familiar refactorings instead follow from a few primordial algebraic laws
Why "instead?" Knowing more math is good, but I think the author is doing his students a disservice. You don't need to memorize refactoring catalogs, but if someone says "maybe you should use a visitor pattern here" it's helpful to look it up and know what it means. It's not deep, but this is the vocabulary of the programming profession, not noise, and we're not going to switch to speaking in abstract mathematics just because some people like math or see a deeper meaning in it.
Defunctionalization seems like it might be a useful addition to the catalog.
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#7> For instance, I teach programmers to tune out the noise of refactoring catalogs and learn how most familiar refactorings instead follow from a few primordial algebraic laws Why "instead?" Knowing more math is good, but I think the author is doing his students a disservice. You don't need to memorize refactoring catalogs, but if someone says "maybe you should use a visitor pattern here" it's helpful to look it up an…
They can learn that stuff after they've become familiar with the fundamentals. Visitor pattern is just a way to implement pattern matching starting from the primitives Java and the like provide.
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#8> defunctionalization, a transformation that replaces higher-order functions with equivalent first-order ones. For anyone else who got nothing from the title.
I admit to fawning for functional languages like Haskell, Clojure and OCaml for fun, but it seems like they are not more popular because having many additional, higher-order constructs makes code “obsfucated” behind clever features rather than written as simply as possible (but no simpler). Maybe for a coding shop full of insane geniuses (i.e., quants, CalTech aerospace, physicists or Stanford research department) it’s all good, but the learning curve of tight functional code is too steep in the vast majority of situations. Even if it’s good, clean and small code, functional is too often a “white elephant” because of the dearth of its practitioners. Hence the pervasiveness of C++, Java, .NET, Python and especially JS.
One the fundamental UX, copy-writing, devops/sysadmin and programming axioms is:
Don’t make me think
e.g., reduce cognitive load by making knowledge works as easy to digest as possible using simple, familiar/conventional, intentional and clear patterns.
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#9> defunctionalization, a transformation that replaces higher-order functions with equivalent first-order ones. For anyone else who got nothing from the title.
I admit to fawning for functional languages like Haskell, Clojure and OCaml for fun, but it seems like they are not more popular because having many additional, higher-order constructs makes code “obsfucated” behind clever features rather than written as simply as possible (but no simpler). Maybe for a coding shop full of insane geniuses (i.e., quants, CalTech aerospace, physicists or Stanford research department) it…
What are the ergonomics-first languages of the functional world?
Re: Defunctionalization: Everybody Does It, Nobody Talks About It
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit to fawning for functional languages like Haskell, Clojure and OCaml for fun, but it seems like they are not more popular because having many additional, higher-order constructs makes code “obsfucated” behind clever features rather than written as simply as possible (but no simpler). Maybe for a coding shop full of insane geniuses (i.e., quants, CalTech aerospace, physicists or Stanford research department) it…
What are the ergonomics-first languages of the functional world?
I would say that rust and kotlin are good at providing most of the useful concepts from functional programming (higher order functions, common functors (map, filter, etc), tail call, pattern matching, destructuring, expressions, lazy evaluation, immutable collections, actor model, algebraic data types)
Sadly they lack some features at the type system level (higher kinded types, intersection and union types)
TypeScript do a better job at it but lack some other features (pattern matching).