Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance?

Re:Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance? by ggm on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @01:00AM (#47133375)

I fed the abstract into an AI with the prompt:

  can you give me a critique of https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16291 from the point of view of a functional programmer who is skeptical

and I liked the answer. I won't post it here, because I think AI answers are generally noise and quite tiresome, but there is one sentence which stuck in my mind:

  The extraordinary breadth of the claims calls for an extraordinary level of rigor in the proofs.

In the spirit of equality, I then posed this prompt:

  can you give me a critique of __https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16291__ from the point of view of a imperative programmer who wants to believe

Which resulted in the exactly opposite emotion (in me as a reader. The machine does not have emotion. It's statistics)

However, this sentence also did appeal, in a strongly pragmatic sense:

  My ask to the author would be simple: show me a real, ugly, 500-line configuration or dependency-injection problem, solved cleanly in Overlay. If that holds up, I'm a convert.

I am btw, NOT a functional programmer. But, I am skeptical. And, I suspect I won't be a convert, no matter how pragmatic I feel.

The answers were quite long and detailed. I used claude.

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Re:Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance? by yangbo on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @05:23AM (#47135277)

Did you ask Claude's own opinion instead of the opinion of the role it plays?

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Re:Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance? by ggm on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @07:01PM (#47145365)

Yes, and here is the result.

The question was

  can you give me a critique of __https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16291__

And the last part of the response was:

  Overall assessment This is an intriguing paper with genuinely creative ideas, but the abstract raises as many questions as it answers. The reliance on naive set theory combined with self-reference is the most technically worrying aspect and would be the first thing to scrutinize in the full paper. The multiple inheritance claims seem plausible but likely trade expressiveness for simplicity. The broader practical claims (Expression Problem, color blindness) feel more like conjectures awaiting rigorous treatment than settled results.

  It reads like the work of someone with a compelling intuition who has built a working system — the theory may need to catch up to the implementation. Worth reading carefully, but with critical eyes.

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Re:Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance? by yangbo on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @09:26PM (#47146526)

I found LLM sometimes tends to not read through in order to save tokens.

Try this prompt:

> Can you READ THROUGH the paper and give me a critique of your previous critique?

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Re:Are functions just syntactic sugar for inheritance? by yangbo on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @09:35PM (#47146580)

The overall assessment is basically saying: "I didn't read it (for user's sake to save tokens). The user wants a critical response, so here it is: I worried about xxx and xxx because it looks like xxx."

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