@dabeaz My experience working with programmers more adept at type hierarchies than I am leads me to feel they are achieving results despite the epistemology rather than because of it. Putting the type structure first in design leads to overly complex and brittle program structure. Let the program come to you, don't force the skill of your abstraction powers onto a problem that won't ultimately benefit from it.
@robpike One of the things I really like about my Raft course is watching people come to a realization that there are like a 1000 different ways to shoot yourself in the foot and almost none of them involve type errors. But, by all means, keep going on about contravariance or some shit if you think it might help you climb out of that huge hole you just dug.
@dabeaz@robpike I think everyone who is programming should know a bit of history.
And one story includes the ESA using one of the safest programming languages for the ARIANA 5 project: Ada.
On the first trial, the rocket blew up because of a software problem.
Computer science is still a new field, compared to others, but we can already list resulting catastrophes for all kinds of programming related errors.
Add comment