Rant after trying Rust a bit

Timon Gehr via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Aug 5 12:56:35 PDT 2015


On 08/05/2015 07:32 PM, deadalnix wrote:
> On Wednesday, 5 August 2015 at 17:12:29 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 5 August 2015 at 15:58:28 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>>
>>>> The point is that '+' for string concatenation is no more of an 'idiot
>>>> thing' than '~'.
>>>
>>> My point is that it is. String concatenation is not commutative.
>>
>> Ok, good point. Except that '+' in a programming language is not the
>> mathematical '+'. Why define '+' as strictly commutative operation and
>> not more generally as an abstract binary operation, considering the
>> middle dot is unavailable? Or, if we want to stick to the math
>> notation, then '*' would be more appropriate than the idiot thing '~'.
>
> Nobody want to stay in the math world. Not that math are worthless, but
> it has this tendency to make simple things absurdly complex by requiring
> you to learn a whole area of math to understand the introduction.
>

I assume the set of examples you are generalizing this from has 
cardinality close to one? Anyway, it seems like an exaggeration.

> This is commonly referred as the monad curse: once you understand what a
> monad is, you loose all capacity to explain it.

I'm not buying it.

> In fact, Most developers
> have used some sort of monad, but only a very small portion know they
> were using one or can explain you what it is.
> ...

Which isn't surprising. This isn't a very useful name in their (quite 
specific) use cases.

> Mathematical language is geared toward generality and correctness, not
> practicality. That makes sens in the context of math, that do not in the
> context of every day programming.

I don't see what you are trying to get at here, but I guess it is almost 
entirely unrelated to choosing a notation for string concatenation.


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