Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> But it's not min and max with the rest of types.

Yes it is: & is min for all types including boolean, where it is "and" as we can see above. Similarly | is max for all types including boolean, where it is "or". You can convince yourself in binary, or pick up

> it is hard to understand. That's precisely why I don't like having even more unintuitive things.

If I tell you something is "intuitive" I do not mean you should find this approachable knowing what you know. Just as statements on "readability" I find this personalised definition doesn't promote a meaningful discussion, as it depends too heavily on social factors.

Now I don't deny those social factors are important, but if you really mean that, you're basically rejecting learning anything about X because (as at least as a factor) nobody else knows it.

Are you sure you want to be that person? Does anyone?

No of course not. We want to be scientists and evaluate these tools on their own merits. If they are truly new and novel, then we would not expect them to be popular, and so we cannot (if we are to be good scientists) reject them for that reason.

It is for this reason I recommend when someone says "it is readable" we always interpret it to mean if one knows how, and similarly, "it is intuitive", should have an implicit when you are thinking a certain way.

If we do not do this, then we cannot get any value whatsoever from what the other person is saying; if I truly imagine this is what the mean -- that they mean they do not have any interest in being a good scientist and having a discussion about the merits, then they're definitely not worth talking to.

So let me say something about "intuition" under this definition: To me, it is important to understand the relationship between the intuition I can have (or generate) about something, and the memorisation and taxonomy that something requires. "&" is extremely intuitive in this sense because it always has the same definition for every type (It always means the lesser). Most things in k are intuitive like that, and those things that are not, tend to be useful enough that they're worth memorising.

An example of something like the other is "?" which usually means "draw" (As in, that's the most common meaning). You might say 10?100 to draw ten numbers from 0-99. But what would `x?`y? How many is an `x? So k gives another definition to this form (enumerate). This is not intuitive, but if the definition is useful, we will memorise it. This one turns out to be useful.

For the most part, and in the way that I mean, k is very intuitive, and where it is not, it tends to be useful. These are good things!



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: