WoodTree

Map, filter, and fold are higher order functions, functions which take functions as parameters.

You are misusing the word callback. A callback is a function passed to another thread that will maybe be invoked later as a response (like it calls you back).

Regulation doesn’t mean it would be safer, just more bureaucratic. There are plenty of examples in the US of regulators failing to properly regulate like in Flint. Adding these regulations often benefits the capitalists more, as it raises the barrier of entry for smaller competitors and makes the market less competitive in the long run.

The Romans or the Chinese?

In a functional language those details should be irrelevant. But of course they are relevant in practice, and map is usually just a for loop.

The thing about C++ is that you need to recruit specifically for C++ programmers in a way that you don’t need to recruit for programmers in many other languages. The barrier of entry for C++ is high enough that you can’t just take your typical developer and ask them to write good C++, it’s a language which requires far more effort to become competent in.

There are also many places which just ask for Java/C++ experience for no apparent reason. Amazon is like this, all of their job listings mention C++ but only a very small percentage of the code base is in C++. There is at least 10 times as much Ruby code and it is part of systems that most engineers will have to work with, but no job application mentions that.

Most stuff is web stuff now. And I’m not talking about front end, we do a lot of back end work in TypeScript because node is lighter than the JVM which makes it a better choice for lambdas. I’d say it also has more sophisticated static typing than Java or C++, while also allowing dynamic typing in the few cases where it is convenient. Having the front and back end written in the same language also reduces impedance between teams. A lot of our tooling is even written in it now, deprecating many Ruby scripts.

C/C++ is not a language. I am also someone who has use C and C++ for years as part of my work and have mostly moved on to TypeScript because there isn’t much reason to use C or C++ anymore unless you are in one of those niches where you need to still program at that level.

Most software problems are not about solving them faster, it’s about combining existing components in new ways and figuring out to orchestrate it all.

I don’t care about copy elision, heap fragmentation, perfect forwarding, when my performance is being lost in the communication between services. What I need is a better architecture and more scaling, not concerning myself with if this loop is being vectorized, or that object is being moved instead of copied, and other minutia which inevitably ends up wasting your time when writing C++.

They don’t have to be glorified for loops, even if they usually are. Map and Filter should be capable of running in parallel or asynchronously, and some languages provide this.

That is a niche, because most applications are IO bound and not compute bound. What even qualifies as “systems programming” is ill defined. Far more critical business systems run on Java and C# servers than C++. If there are C++ components they tend to be small parts along the critical path and not the primary implementation language.

Java killed it for general purpose use in the 90s. It’s never your first option unless you are in areas like games, graphics, some embedded work, or quantitative trading.

By compiling you mean rewriting it in C or Cython. Which is only a good idea for certain applications.

Complex languages don’t result in better programs. Else we would see Scala and C++ everywhere instead of them being relegated to narrow niches.

Python has become less functional over time. It’s also not a particularly good OO language either. It’s really a more descriptive sort of bash that became ubiquitous despite its short comings.

Nesting functions like this can have a bad performance impact because functions in Python are objects. Normally, all of those function objects are instantiated once when you load the module. However nested functions will be instantiated at runtime every time their parent is called, even if they aren’t used. This cost is perceptible in hot paths.

Optimizing compilers are good at optimizing obvious code, so this usually isn’t a trade off. Many of the clever hacks you can find in books from the 80s are irrelevant now because the compiler can figure out what your naive code is doing and emit something optimized.

Modern processors don’t even operate sequentially and will execute multiple lines in parallel when there are no data dependencies.

For most code, the performance killer is when you try to be too clever or have too many pointer indirections. The compiler has a harder time with this, and is also precluded from applying other optimizations like auto vectorization, because it cannot figure out if it would change the meaning of your code.

For true performance, you need to enter the land of intrinsics, manual vectorization, and cache-aware algorithms. Domains which very few engineers are qualified to work on.

So just keep it simple and trust the compiler. This also applies to algorithms, complicated ones with lots of branching will often perform far far worse in practice than the naive one, you can’t trust the big-O alone. So profile when in doubt.

Floats aren’t reals, at best they are an approximation for certain calculations. +0 and -0 are defined and distinct floating point numbers. Floating point math is known to be problematic and does not evenly distribute numbers on the real line either. There are numerical methods used for reducing error on floating point operations when it is acceptable. Otherwise fixed point or intervals may be used.

This is false. Integer division by zero is undefined, but floating point division is perfectly fine. Many languages have different operators to distinguish floating point and integer division, like pythons / for floats and // for integers.

Infinity is a valid floating point number in the ISO standard.

However integer division by 0 isn’t. div 1 0 will fail.

Because / is floating point division, and infinity is a defined value in floating point numbers.

Try it again with div for integer division.

Apple has been selling laptops with broken keyboards for years, not to mention all of the other problems caused by insufficient cooling.