namanbharadwaj

Studying algebra from a categorical perspective is probably significantly more relevant. Other than that, learning algebra is probably useful primarily to acquire the mathematical maturity and abstract thinking that is involved in PL theory.

There was a submission here a few years ago about building a "Vim clutch." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141410

In fact, OCaml modules do correspond to Haskell type class instances, and there are ways to extend the ML module system to support ad-hoc style polymorphism (http://www.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/papers/mtc/main-long.pdf).

On the other hand, you can also use modules as a simple namespacing mechanism (as in Haskell modules). But this does not capture the full power of the module system.

The prototype may be good enough for production, but is probably not very maintainable. When you need a large team to be able to fix bugs and add features, static typing often wins.

If you don't choose static typing early, you might never be able to again.

>Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.

Discouraging high school graduates from going to college is just bad for society. Entrepreneurs are essential, but I would argue that the most profound advancements in STEM fields come out of universities. Those advancements tend to be in highly abstract fields (e.g. physics, math), where there is no immediate applicable benefit, but there may well be one in the future.

Students should go to universities to gain a theoretical foundation in STEM fields -- that's how we find young researchers. And those who decide that research isn't for them will nevertheless gain a strong intellectual foundation that is hard (but not impossible) to acquire otherwise.

It's unityped! It has one type with infinitely many variants/tags (.<string>). Match failure occurs at runtime as in any other safe typed language such as Haskell or ML.

This might be viable using Sass or Less, since they have support for variables, nested selectors, etc. Although I'm not really a front-end engineer, so I don't know exactly what would be involved.

Having one UI would be the death of Linux. I would guess that the vast majority of Linux users today (including myself) use Linux because of choice (i.e. I use i3, and I can't live without it), and removing that choice would essentially be abandoning those users.

A language shouldn't need to have a foundation in category theory in order to be "grounded in theory and informed by practice."

I think that Bob's (the OP's) is merely saying that the design of languages such as Rust and Swift has been strongly influenced by developers well-versed in type theory (the foundation of programming languages) as well as software development (the point of programming languages) -- this is true for Haskell as well, as he points out, but he is just noting that these well-designed, informed languages are becoming more mainstream.

Also, Rust's type system is more complex than you might expect, involving something called linear/affine types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substructural_type_system#Linea...

The Borowitz Report is a satirical blog by the New Yorker, if that wasn't clear :p

By lazy, thesz is referring to a property of the data structure, not lazy evaluation.

`sort xs` evaluates to a data structure which contains the original unsorted sequence.

When asked for the ith element, the datastructure uses quickselect to produce the ith smallest element, while also partially sorting the sequence.

Repeated requests for the ith element will become faster and faster, as the sequence becomes more and more sorted.

This interferes with my GMail keyboard shortcuts (presumably because editing mode is on by default when I open an email). There should be some kind of option to make editing mode off by default.

Or am I missing something?