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Comment by vmchale | Hacker News Reader

If anything, the insanity just got worse: https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/1773#issuecomment-418...

There's an open bug re: negative literals, and accusations of bad faith towards the reporter.

Evan is a very difficult person to deal with.

I'm keeping my anonymity on this HN account, but I've clashed with him before on a Github issue on what should have been a trivial routine update.

I feel like this exchange is this skit writ small...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngRrkQayDA. Evan meant a congenial "why are you doing this" as in like..honestly why do they match negative literals? Everyone took it as an accusatory statement that implied "you moron, why would you do such a thing?" which I at first took it that way too so I can totally understand! But on reflection I think he wouldn't react that way and I believe he was just misinterpreted. And by fake examples he meant contrived examples. He wasn't accusing them of acting in bad faith I don't think.

I didn’t get that sense in reading this. Evan’s concerns seem to be:

1. do other languages allow this? i.e. have other languages prioritized this for development?

2. what are practical situations where it has come up?

Which seem like pretty straightforward questions to ask if you’re trying to prioritize this issue. I get that Evan was a bit curt in asking (2), but I don’t see an accusation of bad faith…

If your language has a pattern grammar where one subset of numeric literals is valid as a pattern and another isn't, your parser is simply broken. There's no question of prioritizing this or "real-world" use cases. It's a basic issue of does this work like any reasonable programmer would expect. The response there is nothing more than "you're holding it wrong"[0].

[0]:https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=You%27re%20H...

The question is not whether it’s broken or a bad experience. Clearly it is. But software engineers KS stuff like that all the time. The question is: is the cost-benefit worth spending extremely limited resources to address? It is not hateful or dismissive to ask that question.

I’m a bit confused by your interpretation of the dialogue in that thread, especially given that — as I understand it — you are an individual with perhaps a stronger grasp of FP and PLT than anyone else reading this page. I think you can recognise that the design goal and the constraints described in the original comment are nebulous since the most trivial implementation without a case match would have been obviously correct. I don’t know where such an uncharitable interpretation of Evan’s question comes from.

Could you help me understand? What am I missing here?

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