Programmer Humor

There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).

The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).