Immediately after the bit about monkeys there’s this
The usual goal in the typing monkeys thought experiment is the production of the complete works of Shakespeare. Having a spell checker and a grammar checker in the loop would drastically increase the odds. The analog of a type checker would go even further by making sure that, once Romeo is declared a human being, he doesn’t sprout leaves or trap photons in his powerful gravitational field.
which feels like a bit of an own goal to me, because I suspect the analogue of a type checker would actually make sure that once Romeo is declared a Montague it’s a type error for him to have any friendly interactions with a Capulet, thus preventing the entire plot of the play.
That’s an interesting (and amusing) point—I didn’t even think of that when reading it! (I was too busy shaking my head at the basic absurdity of the analogy: what human playwright, when writing a play, would accidentally have one of their main characters turn into a plant or a stellar object or any such thing? If we take the analogy at face value, doesn’t it show that type checking is manifestly unnecessary if your code is being written by humans…?)
Furthermore I don’t get how type checking would help monkeys write code any better. They would just have less code compile (and the same is true of adding a spelling and grammar checker to their Shakespeare plays)
Immediately after the bit about monkeys there’s this
which feels like a bit of an own goal to me, because I suspect the analogue of a type checker would actually make sure that once Romeo is declared a Montague it’s a type error for him to have any friendly interactions with a Capulet, thus preventing the entire plot of the play.
That’s an interesting (and amusing) point—I didn’t even think of that when reading it! (I was too busy shaking my head at the basic absurdity of the analogy: what human playwright, when writing a play, would accidentally have one of their main characters turn into a plant or a stellar object or any such thing? If we take the analogy at face value, doesn’t it show that type checking is manifestly unnecessary if your code is being written by humans…?)
Furthermore I don’t get how type checking would help monkeys write code any better. They would just have less code compile (and the same is true of adding a spelling and grammar checker to their Shakespeare plays)