drivebycomm

Joined 1 year ago

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Not a personal attack, and the post is completely valid, but it won't bother me much if you succeed in having my posts censored, as Hacker News (and Western media in general) often censors many people's posts for a variety of purposes, some deeply and completely immoral and corrupt, for this was a drive-by comment from a temporary account.

That programming language designers have to be careful about a type system and its type checking's asymptotic time complexity was 100% widely known before Swift was first created. Some people like to diss on mathematics, but this stuff can have severe practical and widespread engineering consequences. I don't expect everyone to master everything, but budding programming language designers should then at least realize that there may be important issues, and for instance mitigate any issues with having one or more experts checking the relevant aspects.

Comment · 1 year ago

Actually, even very basic code can cause it. The type system of Swift has issues.

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/2016/07/12/type-checker-i...

let a: Double = -(1 + 2) + -(3 + 4) + -(5)

Still fails on a very recent version of Swift, Swift 6.1.2, if my test works.

Chris Lattner mentions something about him being more of an engineer than a mathematician, but a responsible and competent computer science engineer that is designing programming languages with complex type systems, absolutely has to at least be proficient in university-level mathematics and relevant theory, or delegate out and get computer scientists to find and triple-check any relevant aspects of the budding programing language.