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Comment by adius | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.

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Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.

The sneering on HN really has no end. This is a good project! I for one am very excited to see an interpreter born out of rust.

It’s so obnoxious

It's a defense mechanism. I was guilty as charge as well initially. Suddenly most of your l33t skillz are trivialized and surpassed by an inhumane actor. It's a tough pill to swallow.

It's having ~ 5000 tests already. Used correctly, AI agents can help you improve the quality of the code!

Do you see why this perspective is a red flag on its own?

No I don’t, review your code

If I go by the contributor numbers on Github, I see Claude has committed something on the order of 300,000 lines of code. I don't think it's reasonable to review that much code, even in weeks worth of time.

I haven’t needed to do such a thing in a while, but my “rule” for explaining how unreasonable is to say “if I only glanced at each line of code for 1 second, without bothering to understand the details, it would take me 3 and a half full 24hr days non stop to simply look at”. So it’s definitely more than 1 work week because presumably other stuff is going to need to get done in that time too. Actually understanding it is going to be at least a multiple of that, and probably the multiple is ~30x.

I certainly don't. If a software developer has found a way to use these tools that works well for them and produces good results, that's a good thing.

I have no dog in this fight, but simply claiming a count of tests get you anything is like saying your code coverage is 100% - it sounds really good until you think about what 5000 unreviewed tests actually... do.

God help us.

In that case I kindly refer you to the matter of Arkell v. Pressdam.

i'm curious if you intend to reimplement highly optimized numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, and so on, accumulated and tuned in mathematica since its 1988 release?

it's a huuuuuuuuge amount of technology in the standard library of mathematica, beyond the surface syntax and rewrite system, i mean.

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