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Comment by pizlonator

7 hours ago

No language runtime is ever in a state of "obviously no bugs".

Good luck demanding that of anything of JSC's or LLVM's complexity

On one hand, sure, the entire point of a programming language is to make complex ideas able to be expressed in simpler abstractions. On the other hand, we can damn well try.

  • Yes. People are losing the plot and embracing corruption with logic like this:

    There will always be a few employees stealing. So why don't we just use this system that consistently and randomly introduces theft into every level of our cashflow. We can't expect perfection!

  • Damn well trying to enforce an "obviously no bugs" rule in a language runtime would mean zero progress in language runtimes.

    We certainly wouldn't have gotten to where we are with runtime and compiler quality and performance if we had damn well tried to enforce such a rule

    • IMO the very minimum requirement should be that you've demonstrated effort to reduce unnecessary complexity of the problem. Sure, some problems are complex enough that there might not exist an obvious solution, yet usually after a while once you're familiar with some topic the existing solutions do start to appear obvious. If they're not I'd argue we're doing something very very wrong

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My Elm code base was virtually bug free. My current python code base is riddled with small bugs. Some designs makes it easy to trust your code. Some make it die by a thousand paper cuts.

Big llm rewrites I fear lead to the latter.

Perhaps then it would be better to not use tools of this level of complexity.