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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Huh. This is something I don't think I agree with: "Incorrectness is simply not allowed. It’s pointless to try to get stuff done if you can’t guarantee the result is correct."

I'm sure that's true in some domains, but I think they're pretty narrow. E.g., if I were building an internal API that managed money, I might buy that. But I think the vast bulk of software is essentially exploratory. We ship something minimal and see what we next need. In that context, learning what we really need to do is far more valuable than doing the not-quite-right thing with provable correctness.

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For reference, you're pulling that quote from https://www.ponylang.io/discover/#the-pony-philosophy

Clearly, the sentence you quote is making an unqualified absolute statement, which are usually easy to pick apart and tear down. After reading the whole philosophy, I'm not really sure what they mean by "guarantee" and "pointless" here. I doubt they're saying that all programming in "unsafe" languages is "pointless."

I suspect they could just reword that sentence to say something more clear. E.g. what kinds of correctness they weigh most heavily. Does Pony protect me from all classes of all possible bugs? No? Because that is impossible? Agreed. Then which kinds of bugs?

Just before, it also says: "The Pony philosophy is neither “the-right-thing” nor “worse-is-better”. It is “get-stuff-done”." This is admitting some sort of balance is being struck here...

Sure, and as I said, I think their get-stuff-done philosophy must apply in pretty narrow contexts if they prioritize correctness that strongly.

At least for humans, correctness and consistency are very difficult, and therefore very expensive to achieve except under narrow conditions. Mainly we don't bother. That's part of why dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are so popular. Correctness takes a back seat to convenience.

There's nothing wrong with Pony making these choices. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But when I look at a new language or tool, my first question is, "What kinds of problems might it be good for?" From this quote, plus a number of other things, it's pretty clear to me that they've chosen a relatively narrow domain, one I do very little work in.

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