A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”

His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315402

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Without generics:

‘’’

type Stream[T any] struct{ ... }

func (s Stream[T]) MapInt(f func(T) int) Stream[int] { ... }

func (s Stream[T]) MapString(f func(T) string) Stream[string] { ... }

‘’’

Then later you need to map floats:

‘’’

func (s Stream[T]) MapFloat64(f func(T) float64) Stream[float64] { ... }

‘’’

Then later someone outside the package wants to map a custom type. Too bad! They’ll need to make some custom wrapper that doesn’t follow the pattern.

With the genetics approach the semantics are defined once and usable in all scenarios. You don’t need to keep adding methods; instead the caller can provide the mapping function. Common mapping functions could be pre defined for convenience.

When I read these grumbling takes about how Go use to be so simple etc I imagine devs who would revel in all the features they were unable to implement because it would be too difficult in the language. Or devs who love typing and re-typing the same code over and over again, littering their code with switch cases and conditional logic while passing themselves on the back for avoiding “abstraction”.

I suppose you can claim I am wrong to believe that, but it is accurate for me to state that I _do_ believe it, which is why I didn’t list me being wrong as one of the possibilities. Practically speaking, that is the first possibility I enumerated.

I should note that in my example, imagine neither doc is any more inscrutable than all the TOS we encounter in the wild, instead it is the construction (the fact it is a footnote link) that makes it easy to miss the additional doc.

If you have a multi dimensional space, and you are trying to compute which points lie “inside” some boundary, there are large areas that will be bounded by some dimensions but not others. This is interesting because it means if you have a section bounded by dimensions A, B, and C but not D, you could still place a point in D, and doing so then changes your overall bounds.

I think this is how much of human knowledge has progressed (maybe all non-observational knowledge). We make observations that create points, and then we derive points within the created space, and that changes the derivable space, and we derive more points.

I don’t see why AI could do the same (other than technical limitations related to learning and memory).