Digital Mars Website

[Timon Gehr]

On 11/12/2011 10:48 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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.

The benefit is you have more freedom, the drawback is you have to care 
about trivialities such as code formatting. I don't really care, so this 
is not something I particularly like or dislike about Go.

>
> 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.

That is true. It is also sad.

>
> 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.
>

I fully agree on that. I cannot imagine being anywhere near as 
productive in Go as I am in D.