One of my goals for #mollytime is to avoid introducing a concept of errors into the language.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter I do like C++ for being something that strikes an ok-ish balance between making me stop and think, and letting me iterate quickly.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva i do like C++ for allowing me to write LRDL in it. (which acts as a DSL for C++)

[lesley@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva To paraphrase one of my favorite professor: "there is a tradeoff between how many correct programs you exclude, and how many incorrect programs you can exclude"

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph no. what is it?

[camwin@infosec.exchange]

@aeva I think one of the benefits is that declarations are more self documented. In statically typed languages, I can go read a function signature or variable declaration and know all the information about it. I don’t need to go read the return statement of a function to know what type a variable will have. I don’t need to research what arguments are valid for a function, it just says it in the prototype.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@rygorous @aeva which is at odds with the design goal of decreasing the levenshtein distance to making a meaningful change to the program.

i guess it boils down to: what's the worst harm a typo can do in your language?

funny then to consider the shell which has no types and permits casual mistakes of devastating proportions.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Camwin oh yeah totally like, this is super obvious:

float Fnord(float A, float B, float C, float& D, void*** E, int F);

[darkyen@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @Camwin If this seems obtuse, wait until you encounter this monstrosity in a language without upfront types. The type constraints will still be there, but implicit, maybe poorly documented or hidden in asserts. No thanks 🙃

[morten_skaaning@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter @rygorous @aeva can you make a checker that can give a correct good/bad answer on the validity of your program, when you insert random characters into the program source?

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@morten_skaaning @rygorous @aeva isn't that a big part of every compiler?

[morten_skaaning@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter @rygorous @aeva I talking about whether the outputs of the program are still useful, not whether syntax is correct

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@morten_skaaning @lritter @rygorous can you check if it halts while you're at it?

[rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @morten_skaaning @lritter The Halting Problem is oversold.

1. It's not actually generally hard to prove whether any particular invocation will halt. (Just hard to give a single approach that works on everything.)
2. The HP is not even theoretically hard if you expand the set of valid answers to be { yes, no, not sure }
3. practically speaking, the answer is always yes because at some point there will be a sufficiently long power outage or, more likely, forced OS update

[jameswidman@mastodon.social]

@lritter @rygorous @aeva
...unless you're using nushell, in which case each command is type-checked before it is evaluated (and it won't evaluate if there are type errors).

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@JamesWidman @lritter @rygorous that'll definitely save me from accidentally transposing the source and destination paths on various commands to exciting effect

[rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @JamesWidman @lritter see, if this was typesafe with proper constructors that could not happen:

cp(ThisIsTheSourcePath("foo"), ThisIsTheDestinationPath("bar"));