deltasevennine

>If you feel the need to for personal attacks over a philosophical debate, where you consistently insist of understanding the other side wrong,

No personal attack was conducted here. It's just you're sensitive. I mean I could take this: "where you consistently insist of understanding the other side wrong" as an insult.

I could also take this: "Well, if you think so, then consider yourself the tautological winner. " as a sarcastic insult as well.

But i don't. Because I'm not sensitive. Nobody was insulted here. You need to relax. Calling you a loser was just me turning your sarcastic "tautological winner" statement around and showing you how YOU are at the other side of the extreme. I'm not saying you're a "loser" anymore then you were sarcastically calling me a "winner."

Put it this way, the "loser" comment is an insult IF and ONLY if you're "winner" comment was an insult too. If it wasn't we should be good.

>No one ever claimed that in this debate, except you.

You never directly claimed this, but it's the logical consequence of your statements. You literally said my statement was flawed because it was "absolute". You're like "this is what you get when you make absolute claims." And my first thought was, "what on earth is wrong with an absolute claim?" We do not live in a universe where absolute claims are invalid because if we did then "Nothing is true and nothing is false" and everybody loses.

If this isn't the case then go ahead and clarify your points.

The point is to learn. You know I'm not trolling.

What I said was true. You were going off on tangents. It's the only logical conclusion.

In your universe nobody wins. Nothing is true, nothing is false. Consider yourself the ultimate loser.

What's wrong with absolutist statements? Nothing.

I made an absolutist statement which is definitely true. You failed to prove it wrong. Instead you had to do the pathetic move of redefining the statement in order to get anywhere. You weren't pedantic, you changed the entire subject with your redefinition.

As for context I am saying I can make absolute statement about things and this statement is true for all contexts.

My point for this entire thread is that I can say OOP is horrible for all contexts and this statement cannot be proven wrong. Neither can the statement OOP is good for all contexts or OOP is good for some contexts. All of these statements are biased.

If you were to be pedantic here you would be digging into what context means. You might say if the context was that everyone was trained on OOP and not fp then oop is the superior choice. To which I respond by context I mean contexts for practical consideration. If you can't figure out what set of contexts lives in that set for "practical consideration" then you are just too pedantic of a person for me to have a reasonable conversation with.

There are shit paradigms out there, shit design patterns and shit programming languages. But without proof this is an endless argument. You can't prove your side either, you're just going to throw me one off examples to which I can do the same. No point. I'm sorry but let's end it here, I don't want to descend further into that rabbit hole of endless qualitative arguments.

I am from the camp that FP code produces much less tech debt then other forms of programming.

But the problem here is that no one here can prove or disprove what I just said. And that is the point of my thread.

In fact I believe tech debt is a fuzzy word that is is ripe for formalism such that we can develop a theory around what tech debt is and how to definitively eliminate it through calculation,... the same way you calculate the shortest distance between two points. I believe that the FP style is a small part of that theory.

But that's besides the point. Because since this theory doesn't exist yet, you and I have no way of verifying anything. You can leave me a code review and I can disagree with every qualitative opinion you leave in it.

>The problem with mapping paradigms to performance is that none of the paradigm purists care about performance, end of the day they care about theoretical purity.

It's not theoretical purity. It's more tech debt. How do I code things in a way where there's zero tech debt. Such that all code can be re-used anywhere at anytime.

>So you believe that the only way things can be compared is on quantitative measurements? Not with how they impress their users within whatever context they're in?

No but I believe that quantitative measurements are the ONLY way to definitively verify certain things.

>This is the process in which we gain knowledge in an uncertain world. I guess you could take the nihilistic stance and ignore it, but what's the use of arguing with nihilists?

I'm not ignoring anything. I'm saying especially for programming, nobody knows anything. Which is actually better OOP or FP? Nobody knows. This isn't philosophy, there is no definitive proof for which is better.

>No, that's not the definition³.

It is, I just worded it differently. See the "cognitive biases" part on your citation. They use "reality" in place of what I mean by "unaware". If you think something incorrect is reality, then you are "unaware" of how incorrect your thinking is, because you think it's reality. These are just pedantic factoids we're throwing at each other.

>What was actually the point of your comment, btw?

The point is that FOR PROGRAMMING, nobody truly knows which camp is the cargo cult. Everyone is blind. Stick with the program.

>Welcome to the physical world. Where practice differs from theory.

This is called pedantism. Like did you really think you're telling me something I'm not aware about? Everyone knows this. But the pedantic details of the optimizations the compiler and the CPU goes through to execute code is besides the point, obviously I'm not referring to this stuff when I'm trying to convey a point.

>In Manhattan¹? ;-)

Your again just being pedantic. I'm perfectly aware of non-euclidean geometry, but you had to go there. I had a point, stick to the point, pedantism is a side track designed to muddy the conversation. Why are you muddying the conversation?

Is it perhaps that you're completely and utterly wrong and you're trying to distract me from that fact?

>Trying to pretend that this is not the case, and trying really hard to emulate (free) functions (which, to stress this point once more, do not exist in JavaScript) makes on the other hand's side everything more complicated than strictly needed.

Bro, my little paragraph arguing against you was just a random factoid. I don't care for your argument and I don't even care for mine. The whole main point is to say that we can endlessly spew this garbage at each other the needle doesn't move forward at all. Nobody can win, because we have no way of establishing an actual winner. Thus with no way of knowing who's right there's no POINT in it.

All I am saying and this is the heart of my argument, is that YOUR topic, your team of "don't be a cargo cult" is no different from all the other teams.

I thought I made that obvious that my factoid was sarcastic, but you fell for that quick and instantly retaliated with your own factoid. Man Not gonna go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah I get it. But What I'm saying is that there are many times when nobody can truly prove which whether they're in the cargo cult or the other people are in the cargo cult.

So programming is one such thing. There are stylistic camps everywhere and nobody knows which one is the cargo cult, INCLUDING the neutral camp where people say everything is a tool depending on the context.

Nope. You aren't listening to me. I am getting exactly what he's saying. What I am saying is that the cargo culters could be right. You don't know. Nobody knows.

Additionally he DID say that the approaches were all tools in a toolbox.

Sure.

I simply use this "world" example because everyone here is in the same cult as me: "The world is round cult." When I use it, they get it. If I were speaking to a different cult, I would use a different example.

You will note, both flat earthers and non-flat earthers have very detailed and complex reasoning for why they "believe" what they believe. But of course most members of either group have Not actually went to space to verify the conclusions for themselves.

>I do not see where he did that. He argued simply that context matters. (And yes a "bad" tool can be the right tool, if it is the only tool avaiable.)

Well I see it. If you don't see it, I urge you to reread what he said.

A bad tool can be the right tool but some tools are so bad that it is never the right tool.

>And diving deeper into philosophy here, can you name one example?

Running is better then walking for short distances when optimizing for shorter time. In this case walking is definitively "bad." No argument by anyone.

Please don't take this into a pedantic segway with your counter here.

>No, that's impossible. "Truly good" or "truly bad" are moral categories. Something closely related to religion, BTW…

Wrong. Good and bad is used in a fuzzy way here, I'm OBVIOUSLY not talking about morality OR religion. What I am talking about are things that can be potentially quantified to a formal theory. For example we know the shortest distance between two points is a line. We have formalized algorithmic speed with computational complexity theory. O(N) is definitively more "good" then O(N^2).

Right now we don't have optimization theory or formal definitions on logic organization. We can't quantify it so we resort to opinionated stuff. And the whole thing goes in circles. But that is not to say this is impossible to formalize. We just haven't yet so all arguments go nowhere. But the shortest distance between two points? Nobody argues about that (I hope some pedantic person doesn't bring up non-euclidean geometry because come on).

All we can say right now is because there is no theory, nothing definitive can be said.

>Of course I can. >If it objectively makes no sense (in some context), and is only blindly copied from somewhere else without understanding why there things were done the way they were done, this is called "cargo cult". That's the definition of this term.

You can't. The definition of bias is that the person who is biased is unaware of it. You can talk with every single religious person in the world. They all think they arrived at their beliefs logically. Almost everyone thinks the way they interpret the world is logical and consistent and it makes sense. They assume everyone else is wrong.

To be truly unbiased is to recognize the possibility of your own fallibility. To assume that your point of view is objective is bias in itself. You ask those people who "blindly" copy things if they did it blindly, they will tell you "No." They think they're conclusions are logical they don't think they're blind. The same way you don't think your blind, the same way I don't think I'm blind. All blind people point at other blind people and say everyone else is blind except for them.

The truly unbiased person recognizes the possibility of their own blindness. But almost nobody thinks this way.

Nobody truly knows who is blind and who is not. So they argue endlessly and present factoids to each other like this one here you just threw at me:

"Replacing methods with free standing functions is for example on of such things: In Haskell there are no methods. So free standing functions are all you have. But imitating this style in a language with methods makes no sense at all! It complicates things for no reason. This is obviously something where someone does not understand why Haskell is like it is. They just copy on the syntax level something that they think is "functional programming". But surface syntax should not be missed for the actual concepts! Even it's easy to copy the syntax instead of actually adapting the ideas behind it (only where it makes sense of course!)."

I mean how do you want me to respond to this factoid? I'll throw out another factoid:

Forcing people to use methods complicates things for no reason. Why not just have state and logic separated? Why force everything into some horrible combination? If I want to use my method in another place I have to bring all the state along with it. I can't move my logic anywhere because it's tied to the contextual state. The style of the program itself is a weakness and that's why people imitate another style.

And boom. What are you gonna do? Obviously throw another factoid at me. We can pelt each other with factoids and the needle doesn't move forward at all.

You did argue for everything is the same. Basically by "same" I mean everything is "equally good" depending on context. The whole hammers are for hammering and screwdrivers are for screwing thing... I explicitly said your argument was that everything was a tool in a toolbox and you exactly replicated what I said.

My point is: something can be truly bad and something can be truly good EVEN when considering all possible contexts.

You can't prove definitively whether this is the case for FP or OOP or any programming style for that matter. You can't know whether someones "side" is a cargo cult or not when there's no theoretical way for measuring this.

The cultish following may even be correct in the same way I cargo cult my belief that the world is ROUND and not flat.

It is rude, but it is reasonable. When a child acts unruly and immature he must be disciplined with a forceful hand. I called you out harshly and the harshness was fucking deserved, no matter how miffed you get about it.

I mean you expect me to just stand here and get raped by your rudeness? No reasonable man with spine will take that shit in real life and that's also typically why you don't likely speak that way in real life.

This is the problem. You didn't even read my argument. Go read it again, carefully, instead of skimming through it.

My point is:

Maybe one of these religions is right. Maybe something is the best. Maybe a side must be picked.

You didn't argue for better. You argued that everything is the same, that all things are good and nothing is bad and that every single thing in the programming universe is a tool in a toolbox.

I disagree. Violently.

The point is neither the culting acolytes OR people like you can prove it either way.

But calling people who don't share your opinion as "culting acolytes" is manipulative. The words have negative connotations and it's wrong. Extreme opinions in science and logic are often proven to be true, they are often validated. To assume that anyone without a neutral opinion is a cultist is very biased in itself.

Here's a good analogy: I believe the world is round. I'm an extremist. You on the other hand embrace all theories as tools in a toolbox. The world could be round or it could be flat, your the reasonable neutral arbiter taking neither the side of the flat-earther or round-earther.

The illusion now is more clear. All 3 sides are a form of bias, but clearly our science says only one of these sides is true, and this side is NOT the "neutral arbiter" side

This opinion is also biased. We have no theoretical method for determining which design philosophy is better than the other.

We can't know whether the OOP religion is better, we also can't know if the Haskell religion is better, and we can't know whether NEITHER is better. (this is key, even the neutral point of view where both are "good" can't be proven).

We do have theories to determine algorithmic efficiency. Computational complexity allows us to quantify which algorithm is faster and better. But whether that algorithm was better implemented using FP concepts or OOP concepts, we don't know... we can't know.

A lot of people like you just pick a random religion. It may seem more reasonable and measured to pick the neutral ground. But this in itself is A Religion.

It's the "it's all apples and oranges approach" or the "FP and OOP are just different tools in a toolbox" approach.... but without any mathematical theory to quantify "better" there's no way we can really ever know. Rotten apples and rotten oranges ALSO exist in a world full of apples and oranges.

You can't see it but even on an intuitive level this "opinion" is really really biased. It seems reasonable when you have two options to choose from "OOP" and "FP", but what if you have more options? We have Declarative programming, Lisp style programming, assembly language programming, logic programming, reg-exp... Are we really to apply this philosophy to ALL possible styles of programming? Is every single thing in the universe truly apples and oranges or just a tool in a toolbox?

With this many options it's unlikely. Something must be bad, something must be good and many things are better then other things.

I am of the opinion that normal Procedural and imperative programming with functions is Superior to OOP for the majority of applications. I am not saying FP is better than imperative programming, I am saying OOP is a overall a bad tool even compared with normal programming. But I can't prove my opinion to be right, and you can't prove it to be wrong.

Without proof, all we can do is move in circles and argue endlessly. But, psychologically, people tend to fall for your argument because it's less extreme, it seemingly takes the "reasonable" mediator approach. But like I said even this approach is one form of an extreme and it is not reasonable at all.

I mean your evidence is just a bunch of qualitative factoids. An opponent to your opinion will come at you with another list of qualitative factoids. You mix all the factoids together and you have a bigger list of factoids with no definitive conclusion.

You seem to find lying "easy".

This speaks to your character. Not everyone finds lying easy regardless of whether it's allowed. Thank god I don't know you in rl.

Yeah you're probably right. Ill dive back into her book eventually.

It's mostly the beginning chapters don't even get into the meat of CT quick enough. Instead it spends a lot of time justifying things. I feel It's written for people who hated math even more then I did.

Well if teaching length justified the title of Maxwell's equations I would agree with you. CT does take longer to learn.

However if foundational theory was what justified the title, I believe CT is more foundational then lambda calculus.

I actually agree with you. Its not a good theory for finding optimal speed.

I would say it's more of a better theory for optimal organization and reuse of code. It's a theory of interfaces. If programming is all about abstraction then CT is the theory of design and abstraction.

I agree that detail and speed and execution are important in computer science but these things maybe aren't general enough as the efficiency of speed also relies on which turing complete language (out of an unlimited set of languages) that is used to drive the computation.

We also do have a general theory for optimizing speed. Computational Complexity theory. Which is based on Knuth's little assembly language. This theory can literally help you converge onto the best possible solution. Not by calculation but it can quantify the speed of an algorithm for definitive comparisons.

But then would complexity theory be the Maxwell's equations of programming? I think there's a good argument for that route but I don't think that's what the OP is thinking about in his article.

The op is thinking about design because Lisp is definitely a design philosophy. Lisp won't help you design an internet communication protocol for low latency either.

Maybe you did study category theory deeply but your thinking about it from an angle of computational cost. This is certainly valid. Apologies for that comment, Haskell and CT like any other design pattern out there is usually not targeted specifically at optimizing speed, but more for optimizing code reuse and increasing modularity. It's for dealing with technical debt and how to handle the complexity of programming through abstraction.

If you're thinking about it from that angle then I think the universe already has your answer. Computational Complexity theory is the Maxwell's equations of software. It's not a very complete theory but it's much more concrete then all the other "design" stuff in computer science.

There is no best mental tool. This is design, we don't have methods to converge on optimums. So you can't probably say any mental tool is better. It's all just different sets of primitives and category primitives, if you squint, feels like the proper theory of design.

Category theory is also so abstract that you can literally find it in everything. So it's not like it doesn't apply, it applies to everything.

When I say Haskell is a category theory framework I mean that Haskell has primitives that are explicitly modeled after CT and named with the same mathematical names. You don't have to know CT from a mathematical angle to use Haskell but it doesn't change the fact you are using CT primitives like functor to build things.

Other languages have CT concepts like functors but they don't crystallize the concept in such a pure and explicit form. That's just my opinion on it. You are welcome to disagree.

But when you say garbage like "100% nonsense" it's just fucking rude and against the rules here at HN. Don't say it again. Speak respectfully or don't speak at all.

Then your comment doesn't make sense to me. If you designed programs in haskell then you designed them using concepts from category theory.

Category theory isn't just about how haskell works. You use it to design your programs. Haskell is basically a category theory framework.

I would say you didn't get very far then if you didn't come out of learning haskell with the realization of how you design programs with CT.

All of computation is related to types.

You are taking Type A and converting it to Type B. That is the entire point of computation. All else is abstractions on top of that and algorithms below.

Category theory is what lives on top. Haskell is a programming language and style that borrows very very heavily from category theory. Getting a certain level of mastery in haskell well help you see how programming is related to CT.

elegance is a human attribute. Opinionated and open to interpretation. So Maxwells equations are an opinionated choice? I don't think so.

I read the first couple chapters. It's a bit too watered down in the beginning IMO. I couldn't get past the first part especially when she tries to relate category theory to feminism. Might come back to it later.

As a non-math expert and programmer I highly highly recommend Bartosz stuff I linked it in another branch under my original comment.

Well if game of life is simpler, why not game of life?

What does it mean to be Maxwells Equations? Does it mean absolutely most fundamental? Most practical? What?

Maybe there's something more fundamental then turing. Thanks for the book recommendation

I'm not an math expert. I hated math. I learned it off of very informal material:

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...

and his associated youtube videos (which are EVEN better):

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7FMa...

lambda calculus is turing complete. But so are turing machines. So why not have turing machines be the Maxwells equations of software.

Maybe there's an infinite amount of mathematical theories that are turing complete. Why is lambda calculus chosen as the foundational one?

I would argue, the Maxwells equation of software should be MORE foundational. Not some arbitrarily specific turing complete language.

This is what I think it should be (link is a comment in the same thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533321