Iota

[jmh530]

On Friday, 5 August 2022 at 15:20:12 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> [snip]
>
> There has to be some deeper principle that lets you decide 
> which analogies are valid and which aren't. Like, what is our 
> purpose for including `iota` in Phobos, when we already have 
> more general facilities like `recurrence`, `sequence`, and 
> `generate`; and does adding a particular feature to `iota` 
> serve that purpose?
>
> In this case I think your conclusion is correct, but the 
> reasoning behind it is iffy.

This reminds me of Coase's "Nature of the Firm", which looks at 
the question of when firms should do things within the firm or 
contract them outside. If your language only has low level 
primitives that can build up everything, then there is an 
additional cost for users to figure out how those things combine. 
Higher level API (or more generality) can help reduce the cost 
that users face, but also have a trade-off by making the code 
base more difficult to maintain, etc. What you're suggesting puts 
all the cost on the user. I would argue that there is a 
trade-off, such that it makes sense in some places to offer 
higher level API for common use cases.