GCC 4.6

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Don (nospam at nospam.com)'s article
> dsimcha wrote:
> > On 3/28/2011 9:54 PM, jasonw wrote:
> >> Listen kid, you're some biology student, right? You're just coding for
> >> fun. And more importantly, you haven't participated in any long term
> >> real world systems programming projects. This kind of work experience
> >> doesn't give you the competence to evaluate the knowledge and work of
> >> people with tens of years of programming experience under their belt.
> >>
> >> You might be terribly smart, but you're missing the point. Can you see
> >> what we are building here? A whole language ecosystem. Andrei has done
> >> great work by attracting competent CS persons in to the community.
> >
> > While I think some good points were raised here, I find the implication
> > that biologists and generally non-CS people can't do first rate
> > programming mildly offensive.  Formal education in CS helps especially
> > when doing CS research, but it's not a requirement for being a "real"
> > programmer.  I'm a biomedical engineering student and primarily write
> > research and hobby code, not industrial code.  Walter's degree is in
> > mechanical engineering and he's one of the best programmers I can think
> > of.  Heck, even Andrei didn't have a formal degree in CS until recently.
> >  (His undergrad, IIRC, is in electrical engineering.)
> I have a physics degree, and have worked in solar photovoltaics for
> fifteen years.

I'd have put you in my original post, too if I had known more detail about your
background.  Generally I think having non-CS people heavily involved in D's design
helps immensely rather than hurting.  CS people are great when you need something
with strong theoretical underpinnings, but some things require a different, more
real-world implementation and use case oriented mindset.  I'm not saying CS people
**can't** think this way, just that it's not the primary way they're **trained**
to think.  Having people with natural science and engineering backgrounds involved
prevents D from becoming too ivory-tower.  I also think it's a positive feedback
loop:  D refuses to compromise practicality to satisfy the Higher Principles of
Computer Science, thus it attracts scientists and engineers who are more
interested in practicality than the Higher Principles of Computer Science.

Ironically, this branch started with a discussion about Bearophile's posts and
despite his biology background I find most of them too ivory-tower.