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Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

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  • I think it’s less about type system, and more about lack of a separate compilation step.

    With a compilation step, you can have error messages that developers see, but users don’t. (Hopefully, these errors enable the developers to reduce the errors that users see, and just generally improve the UX, but that’s NOT guaranteed.)

    Without a compilation step, you have to assign some semantics to whatever random source string your interpreter gets. And, while you can certainly make that an error, that would rarely be helpful for the user. JS instead made the choice to, as much as possible, avoid error semantics in favor of silent coercions, conversions, and conflations in order to make every attempt to not “error-out” on the user.

    It would be a very painful decade indeed to now change the semantics for some JS source text.

    Purescript is a great option. Typescript is okay. You could also introduce a JS-to-JS “compilation” step that DID reject (or at least warn the developer) for source text that “should” be given an error semantic, but I don’t know an “off-the-shelf” approach for that – other than JSLint.


  • (.) is a valid expression in Haskell. Normally it is the prefix form of the infix operator . that does function composition. (.) (2*) (1+) 3 = ((2*) . (1+)) 3 = 2 * (1 + 3) = 8.

    But, the most common use of the word “boob” in my experience in Haskell is the “boobs operator”: (.)(.). It’s usage in Haskell is limited (tho valid), but it’s appearance in racy ASCII art predates even the first versions on Haskell.


  • Oddly enough, in Haskell (as defined by the report), length is monomorphic, so it just doesn’t work on tuples (type error).

    Due to the way kinds (types of types) work in Haskell, Foldable instances can only operate over (i.e. length only counts) elements of the last/final type argument. So, for (,) it only counts the second part, which is always there exactly once. If you provided a Foldable for (,) it would also have length of 1.










  • Not having a separate compilation step absolutely affects error handling. With a compilation step, you can have errors that will only be seen by and must be address by a developer prior to run time. Without one, the run time system, must assign some semantics to the source code, no matter how erroneous it is.

    No matter what advisory “signature” you imagine for a function, JS has to assign some run time semantics to that function being called incorrectly. Compiled languages do not have to provide a run time semantics to for signatures that can be statically checked.



  • So, the language isn’t compiled (or wasn’t originally) so they couldn’t make min() be an error that only a developer saw, it has to be something that the runtime on the end-user system dealt with. So, it had to be assigned some value. Under those restrictions, it is the most mathematically sound value. It makes miniumum-exactly-2(x, min(<…>)) be exactly the same as min(x, <…>), even when the “<…>” has no values.

    As a developer, I see a lot of value in static analysis, including refusing to generate output for sufficiently erroneous results of static analysis, so I don’t like using JS, and the language that I tinker with will definitely have a separate compilation step and reject the equivalent of min(). But, if I HAD to assign something like that a value, it probably would be a representation of infinity, if we had one (probably will due to IEEE floats).

    HTH


  • bss03@infosec.pubtoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comTheory
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    1 month ago

    The underlying tech doesn’t care about swear words. But, from what I hear, the “AI” models and interfaces that are being marketed for general use have been intentionally trained not to emit such words, and may even be blinded to those words by their creators. I haven’t verified it, but supposedly adding “fucking” to your Google / Bing search query will completely disable their “AI” generated results, e.g.