Digital Mars Website

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, November 12, 2011 22:04:46 Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 11/12/2011 09:41 PM, Jude Young wrote:
> > On Sat 12 Nov 2011 02:19:21 PM CST, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> >> On 11/11/2011 05:58 PM, Jude Young wrote:
> >>> I came very close to assuming D was dead and going off to look at
> >>> another language. (I was considering Go, But I hate the forced {}
> >>> syntax)
> >> 
> >> It's funny, the trivial reasons that people will come up with to
> >> choose a programming language.
> > 
> > Please, I'm sure there's worse.
> > My real problem with it is that there doesn't seem to be any logical
> > reason for it.
> 
> The reason is that Go does not require the ()
> 
> if i<j {
>      // do stuff
> }
> 
> Also
> 
> if(i<j) do_stuff();
> 
> is the same number of key strokes as
> 
> if i<j {do_stuff();}
> 
> and if you want to do other stuff, the first has to be changed to
> 
> if(i<j){do_stuff(); do_other_stuff();}
> 
> and the second to
> 
> if i<j {do_stuff(); do_other_stuff() }
> 
> Which means the second requires less changes. (unless you abuse the
> comma operator.)

Regardless of the reason (be it good or bad), there are plenty of programmers 
who really dislike it when a programming language forces you to format your 
code in a particular way. It'll definitely put off some programmers regardless 
of whatever merits the language has. Now, even if you dislike that, there 
could be plenty of other great stuff in the language that makes it worth using 
in spite of that, but all else being equal, if one language enforces a 
particular formatting and another doesn't, many programmers will go with the 
one that doesn't.

Now, there are programmers who gripe about having to use braces; there are 
programmers who gripe about having to use semicolons; there are programmers 
who gripe about just about anything and everything. So, you'll never make 
every programmer happy with whatever design choices you make. Programming 
languages should be looked at as a whole with all of their pros and cons, but 
it often doesn't take much for programmers to just give up on learning a new 
language if they don't have to learn it.

Personally, I think that I should learn Go one of these days just so that I 
have more tools in my programming toolkit and am generally more knowledgeable, 
but from what I've seen and heard of Go's general philosophies and the type of 
decisions that they've made (e.g. no function overloading and no generics) are 
the complete opposite of what I'm looking for in a programming language, so 
I'd be _very_ surprised if I actually wanted to use it for much. But it would 
still be good to learn it.

- Jonathan M Davis