Just spent a good half hour pulling my hair out trying to figure out why one of the #elisp functions I had just written was always returning nil when I tested it. Turns out, my test was mistakenly passing its inputs to the wrong (but similarly named) function (pivot-table-get-columns instead of pivot-table-get-body).
#Haskell's type system would've caught this. ๐
C's type system would also have caught it, and it isn't worth a hill of beans.
By caught it what do we mean? This is not a case of some undetected error escaping your attention due to dynamic typing. You know you got a nil which is unexpected and wrong. It's in a test case which catches it.
The only thing a type system would change is that you would instead waste a half hour not understanding how your obviously correct function call can possibly have the wrong return type.
@Kazinator I feel that that would have been much more useful information.
nil is about the least useful failure state there is.
(roll m3tti)
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •CLHS: Function APROPOS, APROPOS-LIST
www.lispworks.comMarce Coll
in reply to (roll m3tti) • • •dziban
dziban.netBjรถrn Gohla
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •well, there is hoogle for that.
Although I agree, it should be possible to search by signature in GHCi for all modules in scope, without building an index first.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Bjรถrn Gohla • •Bjรถrn Gohla
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Bjรถrn Gohla • •Jonathan Lamothe
Unknown parent • •Digital Mark ฮป โ๏ธ ๐ฎ ๐ ๐
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •As a Schemer (and formerly/sometimes still Objective-C), everything is pretty verbose, and my own functions even more so, so I can search by function name knowing the type and parameters. (vector-index vec searchfunc), (draw-rect-with-edge-color rect edge-width color), etc.
There's no excuse for hardcore Lisp functions like (wadsf w q) "wander down stack frames for word query" (fictional but not unlikely).
#lisp
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Digital Mark ฮป โ๏ธ ๐ฎ ๐ ๐ • •