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> * I find it quite unusual in practice for genuinely new symbolic notation to be introduced by an author.

This sentence seems to contradict the rest of your comment; did you mean "I find it quite unusual in practice for genuinely new symbolic notation to NOT be introduced by an author."?



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The article and the article it is written in response to are explicitly about notation, not semantics.

> The code is not transformative because the quoted code is not used for some other purpose like as part of an article discussing whatever the code does, it is used to do exactly it's original job.

Hmm..

> The printing press is not transformative because the printed text is not used for some other purpose, it is used to do exactly it's original job.

See the error in your logic? The potentially transformative part is not the code itself. It's the impact to the process of creating the code.


> No abstraction is better than a bad abstraction.

I misread that at first. At first I thought you were saying that there is no better abstraction than a bad abstraction. Gotta love the ambiguities in English.


> Language design is really about what you could do, but about how to efficiently express certain things.

That's missing a "not", right (probably after "really")?


> abstraction is an oversimplification of actual

I think it’s an oversimplification of what abstraction is.


> A collection of statements, all of which are false, is not guaranteed to be consistent.

Hmm. You are right, to be sure. I guess I was carelessly generalising from the fact that anything follows from a false statement.


> rather than

i don't know that this is strictly true, nor that these notions are mutually exclusive.


While in many cases that may be the implication, the author clearly states that is not their intention in the first few paragraphs:

> The statement Rust is for Professionals does not imply any logical variant thereof. e.g. I am not implying Rust is not for non-professionals.


> How is this different

Was it implied that it is different?


> "What I can't program, I don't understand."

This, of course, does not hold for the inverse of 'what I can program, I do understand'.


> how does it make sense to utter the sentence "this has been abstracted [away]" when the `this` is itself the essence of abstraction.

I think that you and I are reading this sentence (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140437) differently:

> > It’s a testament to computer science that this has been so thoroughly abstracted over the years

As your brackets indicate, you are reading a word "[away]" that is not explicitly present in the text. It seems to me to make more sense to read it without adding "away". (Wiktionary, for example, does not require that, or any, preposition in sense 6 of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abstract#Verb, which is the one that seems to me to fit here.)

For example, I am a mathematician, and I could say that mathematics has been abstracted over the years (millennia!). I do not mean that the mathematics has been abstracted away, which I agree with you would be in some sense meaningless, but rather that the mathematics itself has literally been abstracted: from only being able to count and do arithmetic with specific real-world objects, to being able to do count and do arithmetic with numerals that did not refer to a specific thing, to being able to use letter to refer to numerals of unknown or variable value, to … well, there's not such a clear linear progression after that, but there's definitely a tower of abstraction. I hope that this sense of "mathematics has been thoroughly abstracted over the years" is an intelligible one (even if phrased differently from the way I assume you, or perhaps even I, might phrase it ourselves). It is in that sense that I take the sentence "It’s a testament to computer science that this [meaning, I think, notation in type theory] has been so thoroughly abstracted over the years".


The point of the article is that sometimes they're not equivalent, and that creates a lot of confusion. Please read it before commenting on it.

> I say they're interchangeable in this context.

How can they be interchangeable when they mean radically different things?

Both sentences might be valid, and we might have no way to determine which one was meant, but the two are clearly not interchangeable.


> Existing code is important, existing implementations are not.

I am having trouble parsing that sentence.... so now there's a distinction between the code and the implementation? wat!?


>So, some standard emerging does not require creating standards?

I wrote "emerges as winner". Not "emerges period".

Which does not require creating a NEW standard on top of existing ones (N+1), since an already existing standard (of N) can emerge as the winner.


> It is not questioned that any single DID method might fail to achieve one or more of these properties. The consideration here is whether the proposed DID identifier syntax and associated mechanisms has been sufficiently shown to have defined an extensible class of identifiers that has these properties.

This paragraph gave me temporary brain fog. I think it's saying that so long as the proposed syntax is flexible enough that one or more DID methods can satisfy... and then I'm lost again.


The sentence in question is

> Data structures is how we store and access data.

wich is arguably just a bad sentence.


> the fact they aren't syntax sugar over prototypes was a mistake

Totally different meaning.


> Thus, all abstractions are not pure overhead

Sorry for the pedantry, but I believe this would still be wrong as phrased. Maybe "not all abstractions are pure overhead" would work?

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