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by julian37 1403 days ago
This is a good example of why I dread Copilot: even if Go specifically couldn't express this any more concisely, there is a language that can and Copilot's very existence makes it less likely for that other language to be used as much as it deserves.

Besides, the generated example seems to be missing code to gracefully handle the case where len(filtered) is zero. Maybe there's a precondition that prevents that from happening or maybe a division by zero is exactly what you'd want, but at face value it looks like the bot did a rush job.
1 comments
morelisp 1403 days ago
Zero is gracefully handled; the mean of a zero-sized set is best represented by NaN, and this would be idiomatic in most languages' IEEE754-style handling.

Saturation is not. This is what really bugs me: If I'm going to drag in a billion GPUs of external computation (or a dependency, which is basically the same thing but with human brains), I want it to provide the hard algorithm I can't write, not the easy one I can. I am not limited by typing speed.

I also wonder what a "detection" is.

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julian37 1403 days ago
Agreed about saturation and the choice of variable name, but the code would trigger a division by zero and not result in NaN: https://go.dev/play/p/vYm4tSNEJ7M

(Also, in--say--Ruby and JavaScript 1.0/0.0 is Infinity and not NaN.)

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morelisp 1403 days ago
Your playground link shows a build error. 0.0/0.0 at runtime will be NaN. And in basically every language, 1.0/0.0 is Infinity. But we're talking about 0.0/0.0.

Both good examples of coding where you should be thinking instead, though.

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matthewmacleod 1403 days ago
I think if anything there is far too much thinking going on here, for the tiny example I copied from the window I literally already had open with the function I was working on.

For what it's worth, Copilot (correctly) inferred a loop variable called "detection", I imagine based on similar usage earlier in the function. And there is already a conditional in place to prevent invalid operations; if I remove it I see a new suggestion:

  if len(filtered) > 0 {
This tool is far from perfect, but it very much sounds like you folks haven't used it. If that's the case, I would encourage you to research it like all tooling and draw some informed conclusions about it's applicability instead of making assumptions.
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