• 151 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The point is not “never write documentation.” Types tell you what: the shape of requests and responses, the valid values, the required fields. You still write prose for why a system exists, when to use it, and how it fits into the bigger picture.

    Idk, that sounds like a pretty clear case for shipping types and docs, rather than types instead of docs? Maybe you could even output your type data from your build system into the documentation on every release so they’re never out of date?




  • My background is protestant, so I think of the transition to a bible in the vernacular as a triumph of individualism and literacy, but I just sort of assumed eventually the Catholics got around to approving a bunch of bibles in living languages, and the kjv made the list. I don’t have a lot of respect for the kjv as a faithful reproduction of the source material, but I do think of it as an aesthetically pleasing work in its own right, so I’m mildly surprised, I suppose — I don’t think of any Christian sect as being particularly exacting about the accuracy of their translation, but I see a lot of them being in favor of documents that are difficult for the layperson to understand, which the kjv certainly is.


  • Okay! Now we’re finally getting somewhere. I was trying to figure out if you use the computer to get the dog to interact with the abacus or how, and it turns out: no! You can do the factorization with just the computer, just the dog, or just the abacus. In the dog case, he threw a ball until his dog barked 3 times, then 5 times, and claimed this demonstrates the factorization of 15, because 15 is 3*5. The criticism is that, because you choose the number to be factorized, and then do special operations that only work for that particular factorization, all processes that are fine-tuned to produce the correct factors are equally valid, including training your dog to bark a certain number of times.