We run into these kinds of issues quite often. I also majored in physics, but unlike you, I dropped out of my master's program (I just didn't have the talent. Given my generally limited intelligence, it was probably an inevitable outcome). From what I've read, the article seems to be arguing against the claim that because so many anomalies have accumulated in the field of GA, it's now ready to become a general purpose tool. Your argument appears to be that GA has been nicely organized as a standard library, essentially defining invalid states. So it's a high level abstraction perspective, but on the other hand, I think it could also be framed as a case against excessive abstraction. Interesting

> biologists and lawyers spend half a decade or more studying... Latin.[2]

> [2] Let me be crystal clear: They're spending their precious time on this Earth learning a dead language instead of learning about the law or bugs. No amount of arguments will sway me. The bugs don't care what you call them. Criminals are guilty or innocent whether or not you speak funny in court. You've just made a simple thing harder for no good reason, that is all. Please stop.

The absurdity of this claim is enough to call into question everything else in your post.

As a programmer I’m wondering how you get a decent graphics library out of it. If it’s conceptually better, shouldn’t it make writing code to do calculations easier?

(This is a nitpick and does not argue against your main claim that GA is a better abstraction to represent and solve physics problems with, that I have no way to evaluate because I don't speak GA, though now I'm curious and will maybe spend an afternoon trying to figure out)

I mean, come on, lawyers and biologists don't really spend half a decade studying Latin. You can tell because smart people that spend a year or two studying Latin are conversationally fluent in it, and lawyers aren't.

They spend a month or two memorizing some latin words that could have been in English, and then (for biologists, lawyers just stop there) years memorizing lots of names of things that they'd have to memorize no matter what language they were in, and it's not really any slower in Latin than it would be in English once you spent that O(1) effort to get used to it.

Like us (systems) programmers don't spend decades studying the C language, we spend a year or two getting comfortable in C and then the rest of our careers learning all sorts of interesting ideas like generational GC that come phrased in pseudo-C but might as well have been phrased in English pseudocode with a similar cognitive load to grokking them.

That wonderful popcnt() algorithm that uses 0x33333333 and 0x55555555 constants would be just as hard to decipher if it was written in plain English.