Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Don]

language_fan wrote:
> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:25:46 +0200, Lutger thusly wrote:
> 
>> 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 just recommend learning basic concepts until terms like generational 
> garbage collection, closure, register allocation, immutability, loop 
> fusion, term rewriting, regular languages, type constructor, virtual 
> constructor, and covariance do not scare you anymore.
> 
> If something small like optional semicolons or some other syntactic 
> nuance prevents you from finishing your job, how the heck are you 
> supposed to build any real world programs? Just to put this to some 
> perspective, syntax matters, but not much. 

Nowadays you can easily write
> a tool that parses stuff written in language X and outputs it in pretty 
> printed form in language Y. This is what happens on .NET, for instance. 
> Most of the languages there are just syntactic skins for the same common 
> core language.

It sounds as though talking about VB.NET, which is a non-existent 
language (it's a parsing step ONLY). It's just C# with a different parse 
table, and exists only for marketing reasons (to disguise the fact that 
MS abandoned VB). I don't think you can conclude anything general from that.