throwaway2037 9 hours ago

    > There's a number of structures that I think are missing in our major programming languages. Tables are one. Matrices are another.

I disagree. Most programmers will go their entire career and never need a matrix data structure. Sure, they will use libraries that use matrices, but never use them directly themselves. It seems fine that matrices are not a separate data type in most modern programming languages.

▲ OkayPhysicist 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Unless you think "most programmers" === "shitty webapp developers", I strongly disagree. Matrices are first class, important components in statistics, data analysis, graphics, video games, scientific computing, simulation, artificial intelligence and so, so much more.

And all of those programmers are either using specialized languages, (suffering problems when they want to turn their program into a shitty web app, for example), or committing crimes against syntax like

rotation_matrix.matmul(vectorized_cat)

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lock1 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's needlessly aggressive. Ignoring webapps, you could do gamedev without even knowing what a matrix is.

You don't even need such construction in most native applications, embedded systems, and OS kernel development.

	▲	throwaway2037 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is my exactly point. Even in a highly specialised library for pricing securities, the amount of code that uses matrices is surprisingly small.
	▲	theamk 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I am working in embedded. Had to optimize weights for an embedded algorithm, decided to use linear regression and thus needed matrices. And if you do robotics, the chances of encountering a matrix are very high.

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habinero 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't see why the majority of engineers need to cater to your niche use cases. It's a programming language, you can just make the library if it doesn't exist. Nobody's stopping you.

Plus, plenty of third party projects have been incorporated into the Python standard library.