> Unfortunately, the people who suggest that paper don't realize that it's a very technical treatise and not an appropriate introduction for the types of programmers who ask the question.
Programmers of the 'types' (whatever those are) that ask such questions are exactly the target audience of that paper, technical treatment of a technical subject is a-ok.
If you need floating point you don't actually understand your problem used to be a common mantra back when floating point computation still incurred a significant speed penalty. We have come a long way since then but every computer programmer should read that paper and understand it if they want their programs to work properly when using floating point.
You can't really use a tool that you do not understand and using floating point has plenty of pitfalls.
Programmers tend to use floating point casually, either because their language of choice will switch to it when not told otherwise, because they think it is a magic solution to some kind of problem that they have (say counting beyond some arbitrary number), because they are lazy or because they need fractional representation of some number in a well defined range.
If the chain of computation is long enough, if the number of input variables is large enough and if the operations are varied enough this will lead to hard-to-diagnose bugs and problems if not enough understanding is used when implementing the code. FP is a powerful tool, but like any powerful tool it can hurt you if you don't understand it.
Programmers of the 'types' (whatever those are) that ask such questions are exactly the target audience of that paper, technical treatment of a technical subject is a-ok.
If you need floating point you don't actually understand your problem used to be a common mantra back when floating point computation still incurred a significant speed penalty. We have come a long way since then but every computer programmer should read that paper and understand it if they want their programs to work properly when using floating point.
You can't really use a tool that you do not understand and using floating point has plenty of pitfalls.
Programmers tend to use floating point casually, either because their language of choice will switch to it when not told otherwise, because they think it is a magic solution to some kind of problem that they have (say counting beyond some arbitrary number), because they are lazy or because they need fractional representation of some number in a well defined range.
If the chain of computation is long enough, if the number of input variables is large enough and if the operations are varied enough this will lead to hard-to-diagnose bugs and problems if not enough understanding is used when implementing the code. FP is a powerful tool, but like any powerful tool it can hurt you if you don't understand it.