Comment by diimdeep

> Arrays are functions whose domains are isomorphic to contiguous subsets of the integers

Yes. And a sandwich is "a stack-based heterogeneous data structure with edible semantics." This is not insight. It is taxonomy cosplay.

Look, arrays and functions share some mathematical structure! - Irrelevant. We do not unify them because representation matters.

When a language makes arrays "feel like functions," what it usually means is: "You no longer know when something is cheap." That is not abstraction. That is obscurity.

Industry programmers do not struggle because arrays lack ontological clarity. They struggle because memory hierarchies exist, cache lines exist, branch predictors exist, GPUs exist, deadlines exist.

> the correspondence between arrays and functions [...] is alluring, for one of the best ways to improve a language is to make it smaller

No. The best way to improve a language is to make it faster, simpler to reason about, and less painful to debug.

> I imagine a language that allows shared abstractions that work for both arrays and appropriate functions

What if we invented increasingly abstract our own words so we don’t have to say ‘for loop’, map, SIMD, kernels?

Making arrays pretend to be functions achieves exactly none of those things. It achieves conference papers that end with “future work”.

Why is this academic slop keep happening ? - Professors are rewarded for novel perspectives, not usable ones.