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

Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Sun Mar 29 12:03:05 PDT 2015


On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 15:34:35 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> Actually, there is quite a large overlap if you look beyond the 
> syntax. Dart is completely unexciting, but I also find it very 
> productive when used with the IDE.

Glad to hear this - I haven't yet got very far with Dart, but it 
seems like a toss-up between Dart and Livescript for a passable 
language to run on the client (for my little use case).

> Anyway, my point was more that making Python a target means you 
> have to compete with a large set of other languages in the same 
> vein. In the system language area you only have C++/Rust so it 
> is an easier target. Unfortunately C++ still has a lot of 
> advantages over other languages for real world projects, so it 
> will remain my system level language until a better language 
> starts polishing their low level stuff... :-/

Peter Thiel is right.  Competition is overrated, and it is much 
better to have a monopoly in a small domain and build out from 
there - one shouldn't think in terms of acquiring market share if 
one is not already one of the dominant players (and even then to 
do so is often counterproductive).

D isn't a product marketed by Proctor and Gamble.  So nobody is 
going to make Python a target, as best I can tell.  But one can 
surely learn from what they do right, to the extent that it 
applies to new conditions of the future.  The obvious things are 
documentation, libraries, and having a nice, easy-to-install, and 
low-friction set of choices in development stacks organised and 
available.

Knuth is also right that people think in different ways, and it's 
an entirely natural thing to see a multiplicity of languages 
emerging that are adapted to these different ways (and of course 
the particular challenges people face are also different).  
That's why religious wars about these things have a bad name.  
That doesn't mean people shouldn't have a perspective and argue 
for it when such discussions are generative.

D will continue to gather success if it keeps getting better and 
confronting the painful challenges of growth, as seems to me to 
be happening in my short time here.  Naysayers are an asset if 
one doesn't get discouraged, because it is difficult to buy good 
criticism at any price.


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