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Comment by peepeepoopoo33 | Hacker News Reader

Array programming is an extremely powerful paradigm that is criminally underused outside of data science applications. It also feels like the full power of array programming hasn't been explored yet.

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Array programming doesn't really have much effect on how relevant a type system is for a particular language. At most it will let you make operations generic over the rank of the inputs (scalar, array, array of arrays, etc), which is nice, but the scalar values at the bottom of that hierarchy are subject to all the same factors that motivate the type systems present in any other modern language.

My point is that academic PL research has diverged significantly from the kinds of problems people are really facing. That's why we've seen array programming emerge organically to address a direct industry need, and it didn't come from the PL crowd at all.

APL started at Harvard (though it developed more in IBM) and even nowadays there's the ARRAY workshop co-located with one of the main PL conferences.

The thing is that while array programming is amazing for some specific problems it's not going to help you make sure that you don't have memory errors, race conditions, or wrong states in your program

The implementations of array programming in use today are quite different from APL, and they all came from industry.

> it's not going to help you make sure that you don't have memory errors, race conditions

Not only does array programming abstract away those kinds of errors, it also solves the problems that I care about: code that is faster, more expressive, and easier to read and write. Unwieldy type systems do not help me solve those problems.

I can see how array programming helps with certain memory errors, but I don't think it helps with race conditions. Whereas eg Rust ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes eliminate one class of race conditions (data races) in safe code.

Type systems also enable optimizations that do make code faster. Eg monomorphization. Consider that JITs makes untyped code faster by inferring types at runtime. See also this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376010

I honestly can't make heads or tails of the idea that type systems don't help make code more expressive? They allow you to express your precise intent in a way that's legible to both humans and the compiler.

I like (and share) your enthusiasm for array programming! but can you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also, can you please stop using trollish usernames? Those aren't allowed either, because they basically troll every thread the account posts to. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> academic PL research has diverged significantly from the kinds of problems people are really facing

Was it ever not?

As soon as the programming landscape becomes too large.. PLT cannot address every crowd on the distribution. I guess he means that type theory is too far away from most people duties.

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