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james-mcelwain

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james-mcelwain
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I feel like LedgerX bragging that they are both an exchange and a clearing house does not inspire confidence in their risk management department, although I'm sure the bright minds at the SEC have done their due diligence as they always do.
james-mcelwain
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Are the sort of places willing to sell options on BTC the sort of places that would honor such a contract if the price went to 0?
james-mcelwain
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming.

Part of this is because many systems are evolving, because business needs have human inputs and are not always "logical." At the edges where this human interaction happens, we expand the domain of programming to that of human psychology. There definitely are empirical claims we can make human-computer interfaces, but it begins to get a bit messy.

To be clear, I am personally interested in becoming more rigorous about empirically justifying claims I make about the code I write. But I’m also interested in code because many of the problems it attempts to solve map the very complexity of the real world. In many ways, abstraction is a properly philosophical exercise, and I think it’s impossible to separate a pure engineering discipline from this broader context.

Programming is multi-disciplinary, and I think that’s a strength.
james-mcelwain
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I'm confused -- any static typing system is going to need a compilation step to check types. How is typescript any different than "javascript with types" would be? If your goal is live coding, a dynamically typed language will always be faster.
james-mcelwain
·8 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Seems pretty weird to suggest that if juniors are struggling with one niche language, moving to another would ever be the solution.
james-mcelwain
·8 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
On the contrary, nil punning seems exceptionally well suited to a dynamic language. In general, I'm only burned by nil propagating into Java, almost all Clojure code seems to handle nil appropriately.

I'm unsure of a good way to represent optionality in a dynamic language without a static type system. Or rather, doing so with the tools available -- core.match vs real pattern matching -- seems rather un-ergonomic.

I'm curious about your thoughts of what would be better.