[HN Gopher] Can PL theory make you a better software engineer? ___________________________________________________________________ Can PL theory make you a better software engineer? Author : ghuntley Score : 25 points Date : 2023-04-10 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.typetheoryforall.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.typetheoryforall.com) | pizlonator wrote: | No. | hexo wrote: | I tend to agree as I've seen it many times. It helps only a | small minority. But when it does help it is like magic. | leroy-is-here wrote: | Learning programming language theory and then putting it into | practice by writing a compiler will 100%, without a doubt in my | mind, make you a better software engineer. This is because you | will have to put many complex systems into working and | coordinated order to have a working compiler, even if you use | something like LLVM. And you will get a better understanding of a | fundamental aspect of computer science: modeling ideas into a | language and then directly speaking that language. | discardable_dan wrote: | PL Theory makes you start looking at everything like a PL | problem. APIs become little languages, and rich APIs become | larger ones. Parsing becomes trivial, lexing even moreso, and | everything sort of devolves into thinking about interpreter | state. Then it gets frustrating because you can't just pick up | the API interactions and rewrite them more-efficiently, and you | end up chasing your own tail wishing you could. | | I think it's made me a better programmer, but it must be tempered | by understanding the limitations of how and when languages are | worth building. | JunmingL wrote: | I think it at least helps me to learn new languages faster and | with better understanding. | throwaway81523 wrote: | This is an 84 minute audio file. Direct download link is here: | https://www.typetheoryforall.com/episodes/episode29.mp3 | | I didn't listen to it (I prefer reading) but yeah, if you're | using typed languages, understanding some PLT can help quite a | lot. Harper's PFPL book is a fairly accessible text, somewhere | between the Haskell Wikibook and truly pointy headed texts in | terms of accessibility: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/ | | The Little Typer is supposed to also be good, but I haven't yet | tried it. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-10 23:01 UTC)