why ; ?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:fvvtu6$16tq$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Where in my post did you read that I said "[we should] go around
> assuming that all opposing viewpoints are always equally valid"? I know
> what I wrote and that ain't it.
>

Where in my post did you read that I said "You said that we should go around 
assuming that all opposing viewpoints are always equally valid"? ;)

But you did say "this whole thread is ridiculous", even though we discussed 
other issues besides "semicolon-oriented language" vs. "newline-oriented 
language". If you really meant just the particular branch of the thread you 
replied to and not actually the whole thread, then ok, fair enough.

> If you decide to discuss next which editor is better: vi[m] or emacs
> (since as you say, this is "potentially helpful/productive" in your
> opinion) than count me out since yet again this comes down to personal
> preference.

Sure. After all, nobody would say that you were obligated to participate. 
Feel free to pick and choose which discussions you wish to participate in. I 
do that, just as I image most of the others here do.

> PS: it's amazing how such smart people can waste so much time and energy
> debating such unimportant issues as the semicolon at the end of
> statements with such a passion.

One could make the same claim about meta-debates, such as this. (I'm not 
actually making that claim though. I don't personally mind the occasional 
meta-debate.)

Besides, I think it's good to periodically challenge, and be challenged by, 
each others viewpoints. This way we don't stagnate, isolated in the world of 
our own preferences, possibly even blind to the occasional mistaken 
assumption. For all I know, someone might say something that makes me think 
of Python in a new way and I decide "Wow, this is my new preference. I like 
Python better than D. If I had just agreed to disagree then my eyes never 
would have been opened to this."

As real-world examples, when I first started reading about Python, I had a 
knee-jerk reaction and decided "this is garbage, I'm not going near it", and 
that was that. But a couple weeks ago I was talking to a friend who liked 
Python, we disagreed, but still discussed, and I realized that Python did 
have some good functional-ish features - things that even my favorite 
language, D, could use to borrow. And I also came to the conclusion that it 
really wouldn't kill me, at the very least, to write a quck little 
prototype, script, etc., in Python every now and then. All this even though 
I still consider, for example, the rationale behind Python's indentation to 
be logically flawed and inappropriate for large projects. In much the same 
way, my friend ended up getting interested in D (To paraphrase: "Wow, a 
static typed, non-VM language without the muss and fuss of C/C++, who 
knew?").

If we had just decided "these are matters of preference, discussing it is 
ridiculous", and avoided what seemed like a pointless discussion, then where 
would we both be right now? Sitting in our own happy ignorance.