Multiple Dispatch is prominently advertised as one of the main selling points of Julia. But I am not even sure if I would consider it a feature at all. So maybe I don’t quite understand it yet. My background: I am a Maths (especially Probability Theory and Statistics) student, and since statisticia…

[image] Sayod: So why not write an interface: collidable and pass collidable object into the function I don’t completely get this. What happens if the objects in question haven’t implemented the collidable interface?

to add on this narrative, often, OO language would have a class collidable_obj, and then say, car and bus inherit from it. The problem is that if you want to build things on top, you either have to convince author to add something to handle your class, or you copy source code and do it yourself. Bu…

[image] jling: The assumption here is that you care for data flow (i.e. outcome of function rather than change of internal states), so clearly if we’re talking about collision in game engine or something, OO would make more sense to a lot of people. But couldn’t multiple dispatch handle chang…

not as ‘intuitive’, in terms of mental picture and code base separation, some people would argue.

I’m not quite convinced. More familiar, probably.

[image] antoine-levitt: It could conceivably be mitigated with some tooling however. For instance, one could hack the REPL completion code so that if on write (obj , put the point before the parenthesis and press tab [image] yuyichao: Well, that’s not the case. The ide can be made to auto…

[image] yuyichao: No, it only means methods/verbs that doesn’t belong to an object can’t be namespaced. In another word, it means that you have to have your problem when you write something that’s hard to express without multiple dispatch. For things that works for you in other languages there d…

Julia IDEs just don’t have the massive history and funding that have gone into Java editors. This is largely orthogonal to multiple dispatch vs OOP. Just because nobody has made a nice and convenient UI for discovery of methods doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means that nobody has done it. Y…

[image] Sayod: This discoverability feature is itself not very discoverable. I don’t think it’s too big a hurdle to have to learn a shortcut to trigger method discovery. You also have to learn that you have to write . in order to access properties and methods in OO. Unless everyone is perpet…

I actually have a (somewhat buggy) version of this since a few years : [30] [43] I don’t use it much though, probably because it doesn’t work well enough.

Why is multiple dispatch a feature?

Internals & Design

Tamas_Papp August 23, 2020, 6:10am 36

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Why is multiple dispatch a feature?

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