Comment by gingerBill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gingerBill | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for your comment. I mostly wrote this article as a way to get an idea out of my head rather than present it as a thesis on the topic. I am not a philosopher, but a physicist by profession, so I apologize for my lack of correct terminology to explain the topic correctly.

I do enjoy reading philosophy but there is very little in terms of "philosophy of programming" in order to have a common language to talk about. I could either go full mathematical and most people will not know what I am talking about, or go full example based, but then lose the essence of the problem.

What I wanted to say is that ownership semantics can only deal with "linear" problems whilst most problems are "non-linear" in nature. And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy.

I also wanted to explain the mentality that many (not all) people have with regards to ownership semantics and how it regards to a certain concept of "agency", and how it is related (not the same) as the OOP mentality.

P.S. The original commenter is confused about my views, and made mistakes about what I stated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999902

It's very difficult, but important thing, to express abstract things in a correct, yet still understandable way, so "kudos" for trying :)

You make a good point, however:

1) > And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy

It's not exactly true that ownership models weren't "proven" in different languages. Objective-C comes from the top of my head; the main memory management technique there was reference counting (with the memory pool/manual management fallback). And yes, the non-linearity of some structures was a pain in the ass, one had to be careful to not create a "strong reference loop", but... in the end it worked quite well :) The difference is that in Obj-C one had to do it manually/in runtime, Rust checks it automatically/during compilation.

2) quoting your article "Ownership semantics [...] cannot be used to express non-linear problems".

This is a very strong claim. What does it mean for the problem to be non-linear? I would say, that linearity (in programming) may be ascribed to a model of the problem, not the problem itself, i.e. Traveling Salesman Problem is a problem involving a non-linear structure and still the best known solvers (e.g. Concorde) use linear models to solve it.

It is true that ownership semantics has to be bypassed in the non-linear model, but the question stays whether the given problem really requires one.

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