Rust and D

[Peter Alexander]

On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 06:11:30 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> (Had to look up that name) Ahh, I see. That explains the 
> dismissal of
> metaprogramming and generics, and the dismissal Go's objectors
> via a roundabout strawman (Ie by complaining about the act of
> complaining, and by categorizing of Go's complaints as merely
> programmers loving to complain for the sake of complaining).
>
> (And yea, I see the "[generics] are a fine thing", but he's 
> still
> overall very dismissive of their importance.)

He's not dismissive of their importance. The point was that if 
you can dismiss a language based solely on its lack of generics 
then you are essentially admitting that you have very little 
imagination as a programmer. You are admitting that the only way 
you can do productive, meaningful work is if you have generics.

It's worth pointing out that a large fraction of (most?) 
programming languages do not have generics, yet people seem to be 
able to do meaningful work in them.

I imagine that the less imaginative hardcore Go programmers will 
look at D and say things like "wow, how can D programmers work 
without channels?", and maybe the Lisp programmers say "wow, how 
can D programmers work without homoiconic representation", and 
maybe the Haskell programmers say "wow, how can D programmers 
work with only crappy local type inference?"

As you can see, no matter what you think of these features, the 
arguments are pointless because it is very clear that you can do 
meaningful work without them. We get by without channels, 
homoiconicity, and full program type inference; just as the Go 
programmers get by without generics.