[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)