Software development: halachic type systems Question
In the creation account of Genesis 1 we see an initial situation described as "void", and every step away from this situation is described as good. It seems, therefore, that void is to be avoided. What are the implications for software programmers in languages which support void
? In particular, if they should avoid void, what are the boundaries of that avoidance? Should they avoid creating functions / methods which return void
? What about calling such functions? Is some analogue of the shabbat goy permitted?
Reading further, we see in Genesis 2:1 that the finished work of creation is summarised as
The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array.
It seems then that the array is the pinnacle of a type system. Should function signatures preferentially return an array containing a single item rather than a non-array?
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Frame challenge: if we are commanded to continue the work of Creation, surely we must maintain at least the memory of voids to measure our progress against.
After all, how else can we fulfill the mitzvah of freeing memory before deleting a pointer, or void oaths which are no longer appropriate? (See for example Nedarim 23b:1 and Berakhot 32a:24)
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And what of finalizing? Are mere humans allowed to do that? — Monica Cellio 12 days ago
Obligatory “universe was made in Perl” comment — DonielF 11 days ago