Comment by ifh-hn
15 hours ago
I keep seeing articles about Lean recently on HN. Never heard of it before. I'm not a mathematician and not a professional developer so my opinion might not mean shit, but I can't make head nor tail of it. I can't understand what half of what the website is talking about.
Its a software where you type your maths proofs in and a "yes" comes out. Except if your proof is broken, then a "no" comes out. Of course, sometimes the computer is just a bit dumb at intuiting the intermediate steps, so you need to explain like a 10-year-old child (or else you get a "no" as you failed to convince the computer). And storing all these explanations takes memory. And you have to speak the somewhat idiosyncratic language of the computer, which you can imagine a bit like LaTeX but more easily parseable and less ambiguous.
The blog article author is saying that Lean is like a younger child (that needs more intermediate steps explained), stores proofs more inefficiently (taking more memory) and that its computer proof language is harder to read for humans. Additionally there is a technical point about dependent types, which are the principle around which the computer proof language is organized (the same way a programming language might be organized around object-orientism).
Thanks for taking the time to explain, rather than drive by downvote. It doesn't seem like this would be useful to me, or certainly I have no use for it that I can think of.
It's a paradigm shift, that's for sure.
I'm still in the throes of learning it myself, and it's quite the journey. I love the promises behind it, but I'm not yet far enough along to know if they are kept or if it's just kool aid (or perhaps purple drank?)
I've never heard of purple drank before, not American. Which came first? The language or drug?