|
|
|
|
|
|
by wk_end
2288 days ago
|
|
|
Surely if you have a PhD in applied math you've seen that Wikipedia will often foreground dense theoretical issues, even for topics with straightforward practical applications. You do not need to understand theoretical type theory to understand options. It's just like a pointer that can be NULL except the compiler makes sure you can't accidentally dereference it if it is. Algebraic data types in general are basically just structs and tagged unions, except the compiler makes sure you can't screw the tags up. Like, dude, by your own account, you're pretty smart; that's the point of your last paragraph, right? There are, at this point, hoards of Rust and Scala and Swift and Kotlin programmers who can figure out how option types work, and don't seem to have too much of a problem with it and pretty much universally think they're great. Are they actually just smarter than you? |
|
|
Sure they are. Or at least they do not hold an irrational, primary hatred of over-abstraction like I do. In math there's also people like this, who work in stuff like category theory, logic and whatnot. Fortunately, they are a mostly controlled minority.