I think the author is either being disingenuous or doesn’t understand the subject if they don’t honestly address the reason radians are used in the first place. I’m leaning towards the latter, because I can’t imagine someone having an ulterior motive for pushing for trig reform like this, lol. Radians really are the natural unit for trigonometry. With that said, I certainly agree that a lot of code would be simplified by using turns over radians, especially outside the context of numerical methods. I could see myself supporting the addition of sint(x) and cost(x) functions to the math standard library, where sint = “sine turns”.
While not a strict rule, Chesterton’s fence is a good heuristic: before we change something, we should first attempt to understand why it is the way it is.
TFA states “the less tau and pi, the better” and calls the radian-oriented functions “legacy”. I understand that a title like “Turns are Better than Radians” is intentionally inflammatory to get clicks, but I’d expect a more calibrated take in the article body. Phrasing like the above indicates the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about, even though I do agree turn-oriented functions would be useful.
For models as complex as these I'm not confident we can apply arguments from first principles; we could just as easily argue that type information is helpful, from first principles. What is much more useful is empirical evidence, and AutoCodeBench [1] found that LLMs are most proficient in Elixir (dynamic) followed by Kotlin (static), with Rust and PHP at the bottom. So it would seem like, as of publication, typing style doesn't really matter!
