Gary Willoughby: "Why Go's design is a disservice to intelligent programmers"

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 19:37:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 19:16:54 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> You're making a big assumption about which programmers and 
>> projects count and which don't. I wonder if outside of Google
>
> It doesn't matter what the programmers think, what matters is 
> how the development environment affects the project in 
> measurable terms. Having all kinds of features does not 
> necessarily benefit projects. That's the difference between a 
> fun toy language and one aiming for production and maintenance.

Programming is - for now - still a human activity, and what is 
important in human activities may not always be measured, and 
what may be easily measured is not always important.  That 
doesn't mean one should throw away the profiler and go back to 
guessing, but it does suggest caution about adopting the 
prestigious techniques of the natural sciences and applying them 
to a domain where they don't necessarily fully belong.

I say this as someone coming from the financial markets, where we 
have all experienced quite recently the effects of mistaking 
being quantitative for thinking soundly - what happened ought not 
to have been a surprise, and of those who saw 2008 coming and 
spoke publicly about it, I don't think a single one based their 
view on the quant especially.  Yet the field of macroeconomics is 
much more fully developed than that of assessing programmer 
productivity and quality of output.

It is not scientific to depend on an approach that has not yet 
proven itself in practical terms over the course of time and in 
different environments.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/



Laeeth.