> The next big phase is Type Checking. This is a group of zealous academics (and their groupies and/or grad students) who believe that they can write programs that are smart enough to figure out what your program is trying to do, and tell you when you're wrong.
The type-checker tells you when you contradict yourself.
> A good friend of mine with a Ph.D. in languages told me recently that it's "very painful" to experience the realization that all those years of slaving over beautiful mathematical purity have more or less zero bearing on the real world.
This might be about adoption, rather than merit?
> Well, someday they will realize that strict determinism has always, always failed, in every dimensionality-cursed domain to which it's ever been applied, and it's always replaced by probablistic methods.
Well this is just horseshit. I can't believe someone would write this in an article about writing compilers. If you're a webapp developer, you can get away with slinging JS over the wall to fill your customers' browser consoles with red text. They probably won't even look there! But compilers preserve semantics. They don't "approximately" preserve semantics.
The type-checker tells you when you contradict yourself.
> A good friend of mine with a Ph.D. in languages told me recently that it's "very painful" to experience the realization that all those years of slaving over beautiful mathematical purity have more or less zero bearing on the real world.
This might be about adoption, rather than merit?
> Well, someday they will realize that strict determinism has always, always failed, in every dimensionality-cursed domain to which it's ever been applied, and it's always replaced by probablistic methods.
Well this is just horseshit. I can't believe someone would write this in an article about writing compilers. If you're a webapp developer, you can get away with slinging JS over the wall to fill your customers' browser consoles with red text. They probably won't even look there! But compilers preserve semantics. They don't "approximately" preserve semantics.