Rust and D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:08:29 +0200
"Peter Alexander" <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> He's not dismissive of their importance. The point was that if 
> you can dismiss a language based solely on its lack of generics 

Goes back to my other original point:

---------------
2. [He's dismissing] The impracticality of judging the myriad of
languages out there these days by going hands-on with all of them, and
not having some way to narrow things down to a realistic level first.
---------------

If he were talking about some minor insignificant feature, then I agree
it'd be goofy to reject a language solely because of that. But that's
not what's happening. Generics are a major thing. Many people *do* find
them to make a big difference.

So there's three possibilities:

A. As I said, he's dismissing the impracticality of judging the myriad
of languages without having some way to narrow things down to a
realistic level.

Or he acknowledges that impracticality and:

B. He considers generics fairly unimportant/insignificant (ie, to the
point of feeling it's not worth using to narrow down language
choices), in which case *many* people clearly disagree with him. But
instead of addressing *that*, or even acknowledging it at all, he's
pulling a strawman with "They all just hatin' 'cause they like ta hate!"

C. He agrees that generics are a major thing that make a big
difference, in which case...what's he even complaining about?
Just being sore that his language isn't up to snuff? Or sore that
everyone doesn't have time to try out his "wonderful except for the
lack of generics" language?

So any way you take it, he's still not making much sense.

> 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.
> 

Ok, yes, he is saying that too, but it's a ridiculous point and a
faulty argument. (See below.)

> 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.
> 

Still a pointless argument.

Name *any* feature X of a programming language and remove it: As
long as it doesn't render the language non-turing-complete or eliminate
the possibility of doing any I/O, then I can do useful things with the
language, and so can just about any other decent programmer. So sure,
that's true, he's right about that much.

Problem is, that's irrelevant: The important point he's missing is
"If feature X is helpful, then why should I *bother* going
without, when there are plenty of other languages (such as the one I'm
already using) that *do* provide me with that benefit?"

He fails to even *try* to answer that and instead just complains about
complaining.

So unless he's trying to say "You should try Go because it's not worse
than some languages", then his argument is a strawman.

Frankly, I'm getting the feeling he's frustrated at discovering that
a feature-light language and initial "Wow, a Google/Pike language!"
attention aren't enough to sell huge crowds of people on Go. And at
the realization that to get a large following, and better PR, he
needs to compete better on features.