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

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 06:49:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 04:05:30 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> 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.
>
> What is almost always important is:
>
> 1. to be able to ship the product in a predictable fashion
>
> 2. not go 300-400% over budget
>
> 3. being able to train new people to maintain it in reasonable 
> time
>
> 4. being able to add new unexpected features to the code base 
> on request
>
> Perl is a very expressive and productive language. And you can 
> write maintainable software in it if you have discipline. In 
> the real world Perl tends to lead to an unmaintainable mess 
> with the average programmer.

Fair points that I wouldn't argue with (although I think 
predicting when one will finish something entirely new is a mugs 
game - another reason to favour prototyping and rapid iteration 
when possible).

But those strike me as practical questions of commercial 
experience, judgement, and tradecraft, and I don't see what it 
has to do with D or with a scientific approach, except that D may 
have some advantages in some cases in these areas.  I don't see 
any essential resemblance whatsoever between D and Perl - on the 
contrary.

The data points we have suggest that the scarcity of D 
programmers is an imaginary problem, because enterprises just 
hire good people and they pick it up (ask Don at Sociomantic or 
Dicebot for example).  Modern business has a misplaced emphasis 
on credentials.  And if you have a large code base it is not like 
a new guy can just dive in, anyway.  There is a signalling effect 
at work also, at least for the time being.

I am curious about something, if I might ask.  You seem like you 
feel let down by something about D.  Ie you give various reasons 
but I am not sure that's the motivating factor.  What's behind 
that ?  No need to answer if you prefer not to, of course.


Laeeth.