Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Lutger Wrote:

> language_fan wrote:
> 
> > Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:33:59 -0400, bearophile thusly wrote:
> > 
> >> But lot of people will judge D against more modern languages like C#,
> >> Scala or Java) and not against C.
> > 
> > Programmers often belong to three kinds of groups. First come the fans of
> > traditionally weakly typed compiled languages (basic, c, c++). They have
> > tried some "dynamic" or "academic" languages but did not like them. They
> > fancy efficiency and close to metal feel. They think compilation to
> > native code is the best way to produce programs, and think types should
> > reflect the feature set of their cpu. They believe the syntax C uses was
> > defined by their God.
> > 
> > The second group started with interpreted languages built by amateurs
> > (php, ruby, python, some game scripting language etc). They do not
> > understand the meaning the types or compilation. They prefer writing
> > short programs that usually seem to work. They hate formal specifications
> > and proofs about program properties. They are usually writing simple web
> > applications or some basic shareware utilies no one uses. They also hate
> > trailing semicolons.
> > 
> > The members of the last group have studied computer science and
> > languages, in particular. They have found a pet academic language,
> > typically a pure one, but paradigms may differ. In fact this is the group
> > which uses something other than the hybrid object-oriented/procedural
> > model. They appreciate a strong, orthogonal core language that scales
> > cleanly. They are not scared of esoteric non-C-like syntax. They use
> > languages that are not ready to take a step to the "real world" during
> > the 70 next years.
> > 
> 
> That's a fancy way of saying that anyone who has not studied CS is a moron 
> and therefore cannot understand what is good about languages, thus they lose 
> any argument automatically. Am I right?
> 

I dunno if that's what OP meant, but studying CS does not make you a reference in programming languages. I didn't even complete my first year of CS because I wasn't learning as fast as I wanted. School teaches you theory anyways, a job will teach you how to apply it in the real world. Anyone who can read and has the slightest interest in programming can learn the theory by themselves.

As for the different classes of programmers, I think the OP pushed more the extremes than the general cases. I came across a series of articles by Eric Lippert a few weeks ago talking about the matter:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/tags/Cargo+Cult+Programming/default.aspx