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by _delirium
3152 days ago
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PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, difficult to falsify. There is a small area of empirical software engineering that does try to measure things like whether certain constructs can measurably reduce bugs in real-world usage, which would be a testable hypothesis. But they've been able to establish very, very few solid things about PLs, and the vast majority of PLs doesn't look at all like that. It's more design argumentation. To pick a concrete example: Rich Hickey introduced transducers into Clojure a while ago, using an argument, illustrated by a number of examples, for why they're useful. Is this argument falsifiable? In principle some version of it might be, if you made "useful" more precise (useful to whom? in which contexts? how would you know?). But the kind of empirical work it would take to measure it in a non-toy setting is quite difficult, so afaik nobody's tested it, or even really formulated the question precisely enough to test it. In practice, you accept or reject the construct based on what you think of the argument, or you try to find a counterargument that makes them look like an inelegant/awkward construct, but in either case you probably aren't attempting to rigorously validate or falsify a scientific hypothesis relating to them. Basically all of PL design and evolution looks more like that than like Popperian science... |
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What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with these arguments or with using them usefully. What is wrong is when nothing is falsifible or able to proven, either. So in other words, arguments are useful, but it does matter if it has to agree with scientific experiment.
Programming does, at the end of the day, agree with fundmantal truths for it to work. Its foundations are on the metal, and everything is reducible experimentability.
Perhaps everything except the human element: most aspects of modern product development involve programming language improvements that have to do with improving human interaction with a computer. But even here, we have a sort of market for ideas in that developers who adopt better ideas will be more successful.