Kingdom of Heaven, I believe

Do you mean Dan Luu, or one of the studies reviewed in the post?

Yeah, I understand that Option and Maybe aren’t new, but they’ve only recently become popular. IIRC several of the studies use Java, which is certainly safer than C++ and is technically statically typed, but in my opinion doesn’t do much to help ensure correctness compared to Rust, Swift, Kotlin, etc.

I don’t know; I haven’t caught up on the research over the past decade. But it’s worth noting that this body of evidence is from before the surge in popularity of strongly typed languages such as Swift, Rust, and TypeScript. In particular, mainstream “statically typed” languages still had null values rather than Option or Maybe.

Note that this post is from 2014.

Partly because it’s from 2014, so the modern static typing renaissance was barely starting (TypeScript was only two years old; Rust hadn’t hit 1.0; Swift was mere months old). And partly because true evidence-based software research is very difficult (how can you possibly measure the impact of a programming language on a large-scale project without having different teams write the same project in different languages?) and it’s rarely even attempted.

Notably, this article is from 2014.

It’s valid usage if you go waaay back, i.e. centuries. You also see it in some late 19th/early 20th century newsprint and ads.

No, because the thing they are naming is “The Github Dictionary”; they’re not applying scare-quotes to the word “dictionary” implying that what they’ve written is not really a “dictionary”.

“Scare quotes” definitely precede Austin Powers, though that may have spurred a rise in popularity of the usage. (Also, “trashy people never saw Austin Powers” is honestly a pretty weird statement, IMO.)

That said, in this case, arguably the quotes are appropriate, because “the github dictionary” isn’t something that happened (i.e. a headline), but a thing they’ve made up.

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Most of those comments are actually just random people arguing about the merits of the experiment, not continued discussion with the bot.

Also, the bot is supposed to be able to run builds to verify its work, but is currently prevented from doing so by a firewall rule they’re trying to fix, so its feedback is limited to what the comments provide. Humans wouldn’t do great in that scenario either. (Not to say the AI is doing “great” here, just that we’re not actually seeing the best-case scenario yet.)

I’m addressing the bit that I quoted, saying that an interpreted language “must” have valid semantics for all code. I’m not specifically addressing whether or not JavaScript is right in this particular case of min().

…but also, what are you talking about? Python throws a type error if you call min() with no argument.

Without one, the run time system, must assign some semantics to the source code, no matter how erroneous it is.

That’s just not true; as the comment above points out, Python also has no separate compilation step and yet it did not adopt this philosophy. Interpeted languages were common before JavaScript; in fact, most LISP variants are interpreted, and LISP is older than C.

Moreover, even JavaScript does sometimes throw errors, because sometimes code is simply not valid syntactically, or has no valid semantics even in a language as permissive as JavaScript.

So Eich et al. absolutely could have made more things invalid, despite the risk that end-users would see the resulting error.

So…like an old fashioned camera iris?

All the others are not very butthole-ish, though.

There are definitely more experienced programmers using it. I can’t find the post at the moment, but there was a recent-ish blog post citing a bunch of examples. [edit: found it: https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/they-all-use-it ]

Personally, I don’t use AI much, but I do occasionally experiment with it (for instance, I recently gave Claude Sonnet the same live-coding interview I give candidates for my team; it…did worse than I expected, tbh). The experimenting is sufficient for me to recognize these phrases.

It’s not in C, if that’s what you mean.

It’s a “stream manipulator” function that not only generates a new line, it also flushes the stream.