see also: `float`
(Love the blog post!)
Conversation
it's been like a decade and I'm still salty about `float`
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What would you call it?
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Maybe something new? Idk. Even just "number" or something (also confusing tbh)
my issue with float specifically is that the name doesn't make sense at all for newcomers till they understand a lot more things, which gets confusing
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It's prone to sending folks down the wrong track -- much like doing IO in newbie Haskell (wait do I need to understand monads?) or even hello world in Java (public ... static ... void ... system ... out ... wtf is all this do I need to understand it?)
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Yeah, for sure, it's definitely confusing. ML uses `real`, but that doesn't represent the fact that it's not really a 'real', but then I guess neither is 'int'. 'float' makes more sense in contrast to 'fixed'. Ugh. Tricky one.
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Yeah, real would be fine, though you need to know math then.
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oh yeah. 'real', what is a 'real'?
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Float is a good example of scuba because it’s not obvious what it means. So is string
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Yeah except it's still a real English word so you're confused as to what is floating (can I make my computer fly?). It's also taught as "floating point" often and that doesn't help.
OTOH scuba is a brand new word and carries no such connotations.
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unless you are a diver, and then each might be equally confusing
make sure you use enough floats when you design diving computers, kids
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