System.Object is a type of all objects, NOT a type of all types. That is, all objects are System.Object. If one has a class Foo, then every object of type Foo is also of type System.Object. But what is the type of Foo itself? Not of an instance of Foo, but Foo itself. In the languages this paper is about, the type system can recurse upon itself, allowing types themselves to have type. It’s sort of like C#’s System.Type, except System.Type is a class that holds type information for runtime type inspection, whereas the type of types in this paper is for compile-time generics that can abstract over not just types but the types of types as well.
This post mixes up “easy for compilers and assemblers to transform and easy for cpus to execute” with “easy for LLMs to understand” and assumes that anything in the first category must also be in the second category since they’re both computers. In reality, the tools that help humans think are also useful for LLMs.
Yes; because - is on the keyboard and — isn't. (Don't tell me how to type —, I know how, but despite that it is the reason, which is what the parent comment asks about.)
The US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance treaty imposes obligations on Ofcom which they have not met, 4chan claims:
“None of these actions constitutes valid service under the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, United States law or any other proper international legal process.”
Protocol buffers suck but so does everything else. Name another serialization declaration format that both (a) defines which changes can be make backwards-compatibly, and (b) has a linter that enforces backwards compatible changes.
Just with those two criteria you’re down to, like, six formats at most, of which Protocol Buffers is the most widely used.
And I know the article says no one uses the backwards compatible stuff but that’s bizarre to me – setting up N clients and a server that use protocol buffers to communicate and then being able to add fields to the schema and then deploy the servers and clients in any order is way nicer than it is with some other formats that force you to babysit deployment order.
The reason why protos suck is because remote procedure calls suck, and protos expose that suckage instead of trying to hide it until you trip on it. I hope the people working on protos, and other alternatives, continue to improve them, but they’re not worse than not using them today.
If you intend to work on a team larger than, say, 4 people, writing english (or your team's common language that isn't english) is supremely important.
I spend a lot of time reading the writing of other programmers. I've read 4 page documents that are a slog and 20 page documents that are a joy. Your writing, in a lot of cases, will be people's first impression of you, NOT your code.