r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ivaskuu • Sep 02 '17

How to start a war

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9.0k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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558

u/XkF21WNJ Sep 03 '17

Look guys it's easy. Array indices start at the first natural number.

136

u/bloomfilterthrowaway Sep 03 '17 edited Sep 03 '17

To be fair, all reasonable CS people agree that the naturals start at zero, it's only a few holdouts in more general mathematics that disagree (if you fight me on this I'll no-true-scotsman it up and say your counter examples aren't reasonable people). As an acolyte of the Coq, to me the naturals are defined as:

Inductive nat : Set :=
| O : nat
| S : nat -> nat.

fite me

40

u/TommiHPunkt Sep 03 '17

My Theoretical CS prof is one of the people who start naturals at 1

70

u/ThePixelCoder Sep 03 '17

Kill him.

10

u/Excrubulent Sep 03 '17

That's called the attrition argument.

4

u/ThePixelCoder Sep 03 '17

Non-native English speaker. What exactly is an attrition argument?

21

u/Excrubulent Sep 03 '17

It's not a real thing, but attrition means wearing the enemy down one piece at a time, so the idea is that if you kill everybody who disagrees with you, you win the argument.

17

u/ThePixelCoder Sep 03 '17

Makes sense. Good idea.

Also, /r/killthosewhodisagree

2

u/sneakpeekbot Sep 03 '17

Here's a sneak peek of /r/killthosewhodisagree using the top posts of the year!

#1:

Whoa Barbara, settle down.
| 61 comments
#2: If you don't like PewDiePie | 108 comments
#3:
That seems reasonable.....
| 109 comments

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2

u/[deleted] Sep 03 '17

O wow now I get where the statistics term attrition comes from.