food for thought - swift 5 released - bottom types, string interpolation, and stuff.

[Julian]

On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 23:02:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> How many flippin' times to I have point out the freaking 
> difference between knowing something, vs having it so deeply 
> internalized it ceases to be on a separate level of 
> abstraction???
>
> People! Quit using this stupid "...not knowing XYZ..." 
> strawman!!

This is a forum rather than interpersonal communication, so you
can't have noticed that everyone rolls their eyes and dismisses 
you
when you make this argument. Or rather, you just did notice that,
but you attributed the dismissal to inattention.

You get silence rather than refutation because it's hard to
actually refute your claims. I can't point to any of my own
language knowledge and give it a 1..10 rank of "internalization". 
I
can't point to anything and say "aha, that's internalized its way
to a different abstraction level". For me you may as well have
argued that the problem with &1 is that it resembles a rune of
confusion and that the reader of bitwise math accidentally casts a
spell that makes it harder to read the surrounding expression. I
don't believe that at all but I also don't want to get into 
magical
runes with anyone making the claim.

Although it's true that there can be a preferred description to
code that isn't literally expressed in the code, ex. "x&1" as 
"test
if x is odd" or "x++" as "advance to the next field" or "x++" as
"count this additional connection" or "x++" as "include the zero
byte in the length", I don't think "levels of internalization" has
anything to do with this. It's just, to risk using an obvious
synonym, simple familiarity. When you see "x++" you have a small
set of ideas about what that can mean and foremost are those
you've used yourself or see frequently. And I'd say the bar for &1
"internalizing its way to a different abstraction level" is to 
have
used it deliberately (not as a copy&paste) even once in your code
in any language even once in your life.

On preferred descriptions, you might find this fun reading:
https://mises.org/library/must-austrians-embrace-indifference