Why are there all these strange stumbling blocks in Julia?

[braamvandyk]

The great / horrible thing about popular usage is that once enough people are wrong, they are right.

[ParadaCarleton]

@DNF

This is a big discussion, but string concatenation is more like multiplication than like addition, therefore * does in fact make more sense, but it is more unfamiliar to new users.

I think we should just start skipping over the whole discussion about commutativity and all that other jazz and point out it’s actually quite intuitive that x * y = xy, since we represent multiplication (not addition) as concatenation.

[StevenWhitaker]

@mbauman

We’re also just as adept at “0-based” sorts of numberings when it comes to things like birthdays and other durations or lengths.

Though time is a continuous-valued quantity, so I hesitate to compare this to discrete-valued indexing. A discrete example is numbering the floors of a building: while I use 1-based indexing (the ground floor is floor 1), other people use 0-based indexing (the ground floor is floor 0).

[mbauman]

That’s just as tribally divisive, though, and folks equally think that there’s one true way™ without realizing that it’s just difference in perspective. At its root it is the same thing: you’re either counting the difference (number of floors you have to climb) or you’re actually counting the levels.

Sometimes one is more convenient than the other.

[StevenWhitaker]

Right, I was just trying to think of a real-world example where normal people use 0-based indexing for a discrete-valued quantity. So hopefully my example will help illustrate the point to people in the “floor 0” tribe who are also in the “1-based indexing” tribe. And hopefully that set isn’t the empty set

[joa-quim]

@ParadaCarleton

all that other jazz and point out it’s actually quite intuitive that x * y = xy, since we represent multiplication (not addition) as concatenation.

When you write a message and forget to say something and latter correct it, do you say:

let me add to my previous message that …
or
let me multiply to my previous message that …

[ParadaCarleton]

I’m not saying it’s the only intuitive choice. I’m saying that x*y=xy is a reasonable mnemonic. The informal use of “Add” to mean “Append” is a reasonable mnemonic for x+y=xy. They’re both sensible choices.

[Jake]

@StevenWhitaker

Though time is a continuous-valued quantity

A friend did a PhD which concluded that time comes in quantum packet’s, thus is also discrete valued. I can’t say that I understood it, but from his starting assumptions he could show that some equations could only be solved at discrete intervals of time, and not for other times. From this he concluded that time must not be continuous!

[dgagnon]

In French the first floor is the English second floor.
It goes: rez-de-chaussée (RC = at street level), étage 1, 2, etc. So RC = 0.
In the province of Québec you’ll see hybrids sometimes: RC, 2, 3, etc. But that is technically incorrect and cause confusion when Quebecers go to France or vise versa.

[lrnv]

@mbauman

That’s just as tribally divisive, though, and folks equally think that there’s one true way™ without realizing that it’s just difference in perspective. At its root it is the same thing: you’re either counting the difference (number of floors you have to climb) or you’re actually counting the levels.

Sometimes one is more convenient than the other.

I may argue that the “ground floor is fixed” is better than “lowest floor is fixed”, which is just a mess : depending on the number of underground floors, you get out on the street at different levels. You may have to jump from 2 to 4 when you change buildings.