#orthogonality — Public Fediverse posts

An important quality of #apidesign is #minimalism, also called #orthogonality.
This is a quality shared with programming language design as well.

Adding new terms or concepts complicates the design. It adds rules, exceptions, and quirks, thus making it harder to learn.

I'm always amazed when adding a new feature to a "real world" language/runtime when it seems to work complementary with a bunch of existing features. I expect this to be true in #typeTheory but expect all practical implementations to be full of compromises and special cases a la how nearly every C++ feature is a footgun when used with any other C++ feature

#languageDesign #languageImplementation #compilers #orthogonality

I'm always amazed when adding a new feature to a "real world" language/runtime when it seems to work complementary with a bunch of existing features. I expect this to be true in #typeTheory but expect all practical implementations to be full of compromises and special cases a la how nearly every C++ feature is a footgun when used with any other C++ feature

#languageDesign #languageImplementation #compilers #orthogonality

I'm always amazed when adding a new feature to a "real world" language/runtime when it seems to work complementary with a bunch of existing features. I expect this to be true in #typeTheory but expect all practical implementations to be full of compromises and special cases a la how nearly every C++ feature is a footgun when used with any other C++ feature

#languageDesign #languageImplementation #compilers #orthogonality

I'm always amazed when adding a new feature to a "real world" language/runtime when it seems to work complementary with a bunch of existing features. I expect this to be true in #typeTheory but expect all practical implementations to be full of compromises and special cases a la how nearly every C++ feature is a footgun when used with any other C++ feature

#languageDesign #languageImplementation #compilers #orthogonality

I'm always amazed when adding a new feature to a "real world" language/runtime when it seems to work complementary with a bunch of existing features. I expect this to be true in #typeTheory but expect all practical implementations to be full of compromises and special cases a la how nearly every C++ feature is a footgun when used with any other C++ feature

#languageDesign #languageImplementation #compilers #orthogonality