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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

    > There's a number of structures that I think are missing in our major programming languages. Tables are one. Matrices are another.

I disagree. Most programmers will go their entire career and never need a matrix data structure. Sure, they will use libraries that use matrices, but never use them directly themselves. It seems fine that matrices are not a separate data type in most modern programming languages.

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Unless you think "most programmers" === "shitty webapp developers", I strongly disagree. Matrices are first class, important components in statistics, data analysis, graphics, video games, scientific computing, simulation, artificial intelligence and so, so much more.

And all of those programmers are either using specialized languages, (suffering problems when they want to turn their program into a shitty web app, for example), or committing crimes against syntax like

rotation_matrix.matmul(vectorized_cat)

That's needlessly aggressive. Ignoring webapps, you could do gamedev without even knowing what a matrix is.

You don't even need such construction in most native applications, embedded systems, and OS kernel development.

I am working in embedded. Had to optimize weights for an embedded algorithm, decided to use linear regression and thus needed matrices.

And if you do robotics, the chances of encountering a matrix are very high.

This is my exactly point. Even in a highly specialised library for pricing securities, the amount of code that uses matrices is surprisingly small.

To be fair, I do use matrices a reasonable amount in gamedev. And if you're writing your engine from scratch, rather than using something like unity, you will almost certainly need matrices

Even when using some game engine you need some prior knowledge. Otherwise you are just throwing stuff at the wall and see if it sticks.

I really doubt this.

Even through UE blueprints (assuming the most high level abstraction here) you will come across the need to perform calculations with matrices. While a lot is abstracted away, you still need to know about coordinate spaces, quirks around order of operations, etc.

I don't see why the majority of engineers need to cater to your niche use cases. It's a programming language, you can just make the library if it doesn't exist. Nobody's stopping you.

Plus, plenty of third party projects have been incorporated into the Python standard library.

At least in C++ you don't need 'matmul'

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