Rust and D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:04:01 +0200
"Peter Alexander" <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 14:27:03 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
> >> My question to you: Is it okay to reject D solely with these 
> >> arguments?
> >
> > If it's in-line with their needs, then yes. It'd be both 
> > selfish and
> > absurd for us to demand that everyone tries out and becomes 
> > proficient
> > with our language and our language's way of doing things before
> > deciding whether or not our language is right for them and 
> > worth their
> > time.
> 
> Again, no one is making any demands. I'm asking for one of two 
> things from people: either try the language then form an educated 
> opinion, or don't try it and say nothing. The problem is that 
> people are reading "no generics", not trying the language, and 
> then shouting out that it is rubbish.
> 
> 
> > And in addition to all that, I doubt very much that most people 
> > who
> > say things to the effect of "I won't use Go because it lacks 
> > generics"
> > are *truly* basing it *purely* on the lack of generics, so the
> > whole question is academic anyway.
> 
> See post 4 in this thread. That's what got me started.
> 
> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/tpwsxxjghbpsheexyrdq@forum.dlang.org#post-hqhkcxyqtbrbasuknmdt:40forum.dlang.org
> 
> Yes, you said "most", and one post is not most, but I see this 
> attitude a lot. Evidently Rob Pike does as well. I'm sure most 
> people here have seen similar arguments against D.

Yea, I still don't see the problem.

First of all, he wasn't "shouting out that it is rubbish" - only stated
that he had assumed it to be *and* even asked if "is there something
more to it".

Second, obviously he's one of the many, many programmers who do
highly value generics, so it's not unreasonable for him to dismiss it
without trying it. How many people have so much free time they can go
trying out all the languages that sound wrong for them?

If Pike sees this sort of thing a lot and is bothered by it, then he
needs to either reevaluate Go's stance on generics or provide 
direct explanation why Go doesn't need them without dancing
around the issue with things like "Less is More" vagueness and "They're
just complaining" hand-waving. Otherwise he can't expect people's
apprehensions about it to magically go away.

We had a big PR problem with the whole two-incompatible-standard-libs
thing. What did we do? We fixed the damn problem and then
communicated whenever necessary about how and why it wasn't an issue.
What we didn't do was hop on our blogs to whine that people loved to
complain and weren't being fair to D.