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Showing posts from October, 2019

How and why multiple dispatch is good (Julia vs Python)

I'm really interested in the programming language, Julia , for several reasons, multiple dispatch being prominent among them. (I have some painful contortions in the  Python implementation of my speculative programming project, Spherical. The contortions would not be necessary if Python was implemented with efficient multiple dispatch.) I think   this video   gets at the essence of multiple dispatch's virtue. Unfortunately it's a video, who has time for that? The distilled message is that the multiple dispatch (multimethods) solves   The Expression Problem , and that's not a small thing. It's an oblique way of saying that it's a more comprehensive way to do procedural composition than other approaches, and so fundamentally has greater potential for comprehensibility. Composition is the essence of building stuff, and comprehensibility is the factor that governs collaboration between people - including, for that matter, of a person with themself over time.