Come Break My Compiler | Hacker News Reader

Come Break My Compiler

bellmar.medium.com

116 pointsmbellotti32 comments

> No “real programmers” write code in Assembly.

This means the opposite of what she means, which is

> No, “real programmers” write code in Assembly.

because of the missing comma.

Insisting on good spelling and grammar is not about being annoying, it's about not accidentally writing the opposite of what you want to convey :(

Amazingly, I knew exactly what she meant. It's also entirely aside from the point of the article, and either interpretation still works toward making her underlying point.

I understood the intention behind the sentence as well, after all it's a common joke. However, it also distracted me from the post, and lead me to think about spelling instead of the author's compiler... which I don't think was intended.

I respectfully disagree this is a problem for the author to fix.

EDIT: The following is not not incorrect.

They mean the same thing.

> No “real programmers” write code in Assembly.

Scare quotes for sarcasm/inflection.

Would be better and more idiomatic as a singular noun.

> No, “real programmers” write code in Assembly.

The pause here just marks an interjection/response to something else. But it means the same thing (scare quotes and all).

> They mean the same thing.

What? No, they don't. The first one means "There are no real programmers who write code in assembly", in other words "Real programmers don't write code in assembly", while the second one means "Real programmers write code in assembly". It is very literally the exact opposite.

Dang. You’re right.

I was more perplexed by the usage of the word "dilemma" in the previous sentence, to be fair.

The real flaw is that we've overloaded "no" to mean "zero" as well as the opposite of "yes". Without that ambiguity, the sentence would be fine (even if a comma were still technically correct).

> Insisting on good spelling and grammar is not about being annoying, it's about not accidentally writing the opposite of what you want to convey :(

True, but in this case, you were able to infer the intended meaning from context, which is what reading is: interpreting text, which involves assigning meanings to symbols and resolving ambiguities to render the whole as intelligible as possible. Since nothing can be drawn out of the text per se, this means you are the one bringing all the meaning to the text. Whatever the author is conveying is, in one way or another, latent in the context that's already in your mind. Even fiction is composed of elements already in your mind.

(Which is why a lack of experience can be an obstacle to effective reading.)

> True, but in this case, you were able to infer the intended meaning from context, which is what reading is: interpreting text, which involves assigning meanings to symbols and resolving ambiguities to render the whole as intelligible as possible.

Yes, but each ambiguity in a given piece of text makes it harder to infer the intended meaning, in a way that's not linear with the number of ambiguities (or at least doesn't feel so). A missed comma here, an extra comma there, couple typos, and suddenly the text switches from understandable, if slightly tiresome to read, to entirely unintelligible sequence of glyphs that requires approaching it as a puzzle to have a chance at understanding what it says. The threshold for this switch is different for everyone, so it's in everyone's interest to keep your grammar and spelling correct.

Good grammar? "Real programmers" is a colloquialism, and being concerned about good grammar is an indication that the subject is formal or technical writing, in which such constructions should be avoided. "Real programmers" is borrowed from "real men" and that expression is a colloquial synonym for "douche bag", according to this reference:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=real%20men

This is clear if we ask, 'what's the opposite of a real programmer?' - perhaps an imaginary programmer?

>Good grammar? "Real programmers" is a colloquialism, [...] This is clear if we ask, 'what's the opposite of a real programmer?' - perhaps an imaginary programmer?

No, that's not the misinterpretation that gp (ggambetta) was trying explain with the missing commas causing parsing confusion.

The "real programmers" isn't the main confusion. It's the missing commas.

The author was trying to convey (with some sarcasm) how some programmers have a sense of superiority when they can program in the lower abstraction layer underneath the higher-level programming language others are using. E.g. You code in Javascript?!? Meh, real programmers code in C. You code in C?!? Real programmers code in assembly. etc.

It's only after some readers get to the 4th sentence ("butterflies") that the common joke is revealed and they backtrack to the previous sentences to realize they're missing commas that would have made the joke easier-to-read : It’s really an age old dilemma in computers: “real programmers” write code in C. No [,] “real programmers” write code in Assembly. No [,] “real programmers” write code in binary. No, wait, “real programmers” use butterflies.

Analogous to this XKCD joke about "purity" : https://xkcd.com/435/

The distraction of readers trying to parse the missing commas -- detracted from the author's intended rhetorical effect.

Yes, exactly. I really thought the author was trying to argue that no one writes in assembly. But then when I reached the butterfly line, I realized it was just sloppy writing missing commas.

Oh my god, yes. I had to re-read that paragraph three times, and then open the xkcd to confirm what the author really meant. This absolutely killed the flow of the article for me.

My only knowledge on modeling languages is: TLA+ exists, I've seen Lamport's introductory videos/course, I've followed along to the course examples.

At a glance, I like that this looks more approachable to write, and I like that. Can it still be used to prove properties like liveliness? The fact that Fault seems to use bounded loops seems counter-intuitive to proving those "x eventually happens" conditions. As I understand (from a distance) you can model those in TLA+.

PS. The question regards the design of Fault, not the current state of implementation.

(Just for the sake of nitpicking: the term is "liveness")

Short answer is no (seemingly). From the docs it seems Fault only supports assertions. Finding an assertion violation is a reachability problem and is immediately usable to prove safety problems, not liveness.

But, long answer is "kind of"!

That a counterexample to a liveness property ("x eventually happens") generally is a lasso-shaped execution (so a prefix + a cycle) where x never happens. With that in mind, you can reduce liveness checking to reachability: the only problem is, you have to add state-tracking to your model and assert "the system never closes a cycle when x never happens".

This is explained in detail, e.g., in Armin Biere, Cyrille Artho, and Viktor Schuppan. 2002. Liveness Checking as Safety Checking. Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 66, 2 (2002), 160–177. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1571-0661(04)80410-9

> (Just for the sake of nitpicking: the term is "liveness")

I appreciate the nitpick, I'm new to this :).

I quite like this approach to system spec languages. It feels a bit more modern than the rather unwieldy TLA+. Can someone explain how a spec language can exist without sets as a first class datatype though? (admittedly I only had time for a cursory glance at Fault).

Also had a quick look at the codebase and was positively surpised by it being Golang. Oh and just in case the author has a peek at this thread; the only source file I opened had this interesting typo :D "NewProcesser() *Processor"

Nice that this is now real! I followed along with Marianne Writes a Programming Language [0] which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it's cool to see this come to fruition.

[0]: https://bellmar.medium.com/marianne-writes-a-programming-lan...

This seems procedural to me and modern architectures lean towards events, boundaries, and language.

I get it, but it’s not how I decipher and construct models.

Useless title for HN.[1] A compiler tells me that it’s some language that can be compiled. “Break” tells me that either the compiler is mature and the author is daring someone to fuzz it, or that the compiler is not mature and hence it’s easy to find something that “breaks” while using it (it’s the latter).

Would I break someone’s program? I have no reason to care about their program based on this title.

[1] Of course there’s the “no ediotoralizing” rule. Even though it’s submitted by the original author.

While I'd never heard of the language or compiler before, so unless you want a title that covers the blog post, I don't know how you want to get rid of your objections.

Blog post with submission title: “Fault is a language for modeling systems that compiles down to SMT”

This is in the power of the submitter since the submitter is the author of this piece.

That would be an incorrect description of the content. The point of the article isn't to introduce the language, the point is to sollicit feedback.

The article perfectly explains why the author wants you to break the compiler. It's so it can be improved and to do that user feedback (by breaking the compiler) is needed.

“Test my software”

I’ll get right on that.

The title isn’t editorialized. The title on HN is exactly the same as the original blog post

Of course it isn’t. That’s what I wrote. “Of course there’s the “no ediotoralizing” rule” to acknowledge and preempt the “no editorializing” responses. But (as I wrote) the submitter and the author are the same person.

Oops, misunderstood

A particularly low value contribution. The title is a copy of the article's title and pretty accurately captures its content. This is being difficult for the sake of being difficult.

A meta-complaint about a meta-complaint. Wonderfully on-topic in the HN posting spirit. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com