Re:Examples of Incorrect Abstractions in Other Languages
by gugagore on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:15AM
(#23243505)
This reason doesn't make sense to me, because of `+`. If I do `a + b`, you don't know if my intent is to add numbers, join strings, or concatenate lists. If `sum` and `join` are supposed to look different to convey intent, then the binary operators should look different as well.
Re:Examples of Incorrect Abstractions in Other Languages
by stouset on Thursday May 21, 2020 @04:12PM
(#23264402)
The argument against operator overloading doesn't hold water with me at all.
If 3 + 2 is allowed but you don't think "a" + "b" should work, why should 8.1 + 1.9 work? If your argument is that it's because they're numbers, what about a Complex library, or numeric vectors, or GMP? If I can do 3 + 2 and 8.1 + 1.9, I should be allowed to make Complex{0, 1} + Complex{4, 9} work, or Vector{1, 0} + Vector{2, 2}, or BigInt{99999...} + BigInt{9999...}.
I can sort of see the argument in dynamically-typed languages when you might not know what the operands are ahead of time, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and Go (Rust gets this very, very right FWIW)? There's no defensible argument against it. Why is `+` magic and holy, but a `fn add(...)` isn't?
As a reader, you don't know what an abstract operation does, just that it should obey certain rules. Writing code abstractly when abstraction is unnecessary removes information, which has a cost in readability.
Now if you want to write abstract code then it will be frustrating, but some languages are optimized for writing concrete code.
At least, in this particular case. I'm not sure how consistent Python is about this.