Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We should distinguish between "double dispatch" in the abstract and a concrete problem being solved with it. The concrete problem often has more constraints, not mentioned when talking about it abstractly.

For example, using a different language means that the build system needs to support the other language, which can significantly complicate the difficulty for users of a library compared to a "pure" version written in the same language as the rest of the ecosystem. It may also limit portability, if the original language and the other language you pick don't support the same platforms. This isn't a good thing to inflict on users of your library.

To be a bit more concrete about it, suppose you are writing code in Rust to target WebAssembly. Pure Rust libraries are more likely to work than those written in a different language.

There are other ways to avoid this. In Go, you can use the "go generate" command to generate Go code from code written in another language, and check in the Go code, so downstream users of your library don't need any special tools. That's probably okay for private dependency on code written in another language, but less useful for datatypes used in public API's.

Someone talking about OO "epicycles" is ignoring most of the constraints that library maintainers face. It seems unsympathetic and out of touch.

It's fine to justify how we write code based on the code we've already written, but that is the very "hammer-first" reasoning the original comment was disparaging!

Even if we can't rewrite everything up front, it's used to think about the problem at hand from first principles, ignoring the constraints of any particular language. From the vantage point "double dispatch" will never arise.

If this Church-encoding workaround were useful, there would need to be at least one concrete situation where you find it useful.

It's apparently not useful in languages with sum types, and it doesn't seem useful in an object-oriented language either (where you'd use the normal visitor pattern). So, when is it useful? The author doesn't have a practical example.

I guess there might be a language somewhere that has neither sum types nor methods? It's kind of a reach.

But, maybe it's useful educationally, as a good way to think about problems? That doesn't seem particularly likely either, considering that you can apply the visitor pattern just fine without knowing about Church encodings at all.

Disparaging "double dispatch" as "epicycles" while promoting Church encoding as "legit" just seems out of touch with how practical programmers think. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use Church encoding to explain what's going on to a newbie.

Maybe there is some other situation where it's useful, but it's not explained.

Church encoding is not a good way to write real-world programs. There, I said it.

I said it was useful theory. E.g. a way to shrink a programming language to remove data types so there's less drudgery in proofs about that language. That's not a regular programming task in the slightest.

Okay, that's pretty specialized, but I can see how it would be useful in proofs.

The point of the post wasn't to explain that Church encoding is a replacement for the visitor pattern. The purpose of the post was to explain that the visitor pattern is essentially the same thing as Church encoding (thus the title of the post), because I noticed a lot of people were not appreciating that connection between the two.

That's fine, but it seems like some of the confusion comes from unclear expectations? There is a vague promise at the beginning of the post that this will somehow be useful for programming:

"This post also explains how you can usefully employ the visitor pattern / Church encoding / Böhm-Berarducci encoding to expand your programming toolbox."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com