OSNews article about C++09 degenerates into C++ vs. D discussion

[Steve Horne]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:55:27 -0800, "John Reimer"
<terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote:

>It was too long, but with good points.  If it were pared down, it would  
>read easier and the points might hit home even harder.

That's my writing style, normally - except when no-one agrees with the
'good points' bit, anyway.

Trouble is, if I were to got through and try to pare down, it would
get longer. I'd worry that actually there is a narrow range of
platforms and applications where non-GC might work but GC not - those
that are right on the edge of coping with malloc/free and unable to
bare any GC overhead.

Its an Aspergers thing. People misunderstand what you say, so you get
more verbose to try and avoid the misunderstandings. You have no
common sense yourself so you can't know what can be left to the common
sense of others. Besides, odd non-verbals tend to trigger mistrust,
and that triggers defensiveness in the form of nit-picking every
possible gap in your reasoning.

>If you really take an honest look at OSNEWS posts and others, you will  
>realize that some of these people are literally annoyed at D and D  
>promoters for a reason deeper and unrelated to the language.  You can't  
>argue with that.

D is openly embracing something that people have stereotyped as a
feature of scripting languages. Sure some of those scripting languages
are good for full applications, and sure Java is much more aimed at
applications, and sure theres all those 'academic' languages too, but
a lot of systems level programmers had GC tagged as something for
'lesser' programmers who might manage the odd high level app, or
academic geeks who never write a line of real-world code.

Stereotypes. Status. In-groups. Non-GC has become a symbol, really.

When I first encountered D, and read that it is a systems-level
language with GC, at first I laughed and then all the 'reasons' why
thats bad went through my head. Looking back, that sounds like a
defence mechanism to me. Why should I need a defence mechanism?
Perhaps I felt under attack?

This is just me, of course, and I got over it, but anyone care to bet
that I'm the only one?

Of course putting this kind of thing out as advocacy is a bad idea.
When people feel under attack, the worst thing you can do is accuse
them of being irrational.

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