GCC 4.6

[jasonw]

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> On 3/29/11 4:37 PM, so wrote:
> [snip]
> > I find his posts among the most informative.
> 
> I don't meant to offend anyone here but I think it's worth making a 
> point for your benefit and others'. If you are interested in programming 
> language theory, probably there are better sources of information to 
> use. Though I don't consider myself anywhere near an expert, my masters 
> thesis was on programming language theory, which gives me some amount of 
> perspective. "Cargo culture" would be a gross exaggeration, but much of 
> the knowledge disseminated by bearophile is superficially absorbed 
> literature that is served back semi-digested along with a hodge-podge of 
> personal opinions of various degrees of correctness.
> 
> The only reason I felt compelled to make this point is the (now obvious) 
> risk in taking such posts as a good source of information. It is is 
> dangerous to take non-critically the occasional enormity that sneaks in. 
> That's why I suggested in the past and am suggesting it again - please 
> don't feign expertise as some may actually fall for it.

You hit the nail on the head here. I see two real problems with his messages:

1) he's "force fitting" every possible language feature he learns into D. Clearly some features are useful, others are not, and this is why many of bearophile's ideas fail and generate endless debates and unnecessary noise. He can't see that the features just don't fit in.

If you lack the vision of good language design as a whole, you shouldn't start suggesting new features like this. I'd appreciate it more if we won't introduce "new" concepts in this way. If some feature X is terribly useful in some language Y, why not explain the feature in that concept. It's a total failure to port every possible feature to D in one way or another before even discussing the feature in general. If we start talking programming language discussion in a neutral tone, I don't think digitalmars.d is the best place to continue. The traffic is already quite large for someone who doesn't work in the core language development team

2) Programming language design requires rigorous definition of terms and other things. The D community doesn't encourage using precise, well-defined, unique terms. This leads to some subtleties and other problems in the discussions. Again I think the best place for general PL discussion is somewhere else, preferable in the academia. I'm sorry to say this, but I likely need to study how to put him in the kill file. The whole bearophile phenomenon takes place on an isolated island somewhere in the dark corners of D's history. The bug reports and benchmarks are priceless, but these "lectures" about other language often aren't.

> 
> I have no doubt great personal improvement has been made in the past 
> years, but the tone is still an octave above what it could be at its best.

That's true, but it's also a bad sign that he doesn't react in any way when we are criticizing him in the public.