I apologize if you felt it was a personal attack, because it certainly wasn't intended as such. I've always appreciated the Julia community and how welcoming and encouraging it is and I wouldn't want to tarnish that reputation. I'm far from the best person to comment on the particularities of type invariance/co-variance/contra-variance, but I still enjoy contributing to discussions when I can. In this case, I felt my own experience getting comfortable with parametric types could be useful.
-Jacob On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Oliver Woodford <[email protected]>wrote: > On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 4:51:13 PM UTC+1, Jacob Quinn wrote: >> >> I was just trying to share some of my own experience with Julia from >> having used it for the last two years, not be dismissive or condescending. >> That this hasn't been a show-stopper for some 300+ packages now, IMO, >> *is* a valid point against making a somewhat disruptive change to the >> type system. >> > > OK, well from the first two lines it seemed like you were contesting the > issue that detecting homo/heterogeneity could ever be useful, not about my > suggested change to the language. I had given a good reason for the former > already, which you didn't address. > > Also, the statement "frob{T<:Real}(x::Vector{T}) gets you exactly what you > want" isn't true; in my original post I specifically said I wanted to > distinguish homogeneous and heterogeneous arrays, and as was pointed out, > this doesn't achieve that. > > "I was just trying to..". No, you were *also* trying to explain away my > question on the grounds of my experience, rather than address it directly. > But a true fact is true, regardless of who says it, and we should give > weight to the argument rather than who is saying it. The latter just gives > more power to those who already have it, and corrupts society. Please > consider this point, because I stand by what I said - I don't think your > response was constructive. It attacked me and not my argument, and that is > not a healthy way to evaluate ideas. > > >> >> By stating that I come from a *non*-technical background, I was also >> trying to qualify that you may feel free to dismiss my argument because I >> may well be talking nonsense :). >> > > Duly dismissed :). > >
