Rust and D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:12:33 +0200
"Peter Alexander" <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 19:09:46 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
> >
> > I think that argument is making the claims that:
> >
> > 1. all features are equally valuable
> >
> > 2. if one can get by without a feature, then that feature is 
> > not needed
> >
> > Both of those are invalid.
> 
> I'm not making claim 1, and claim 2 is true by definition.
> 

Such a feature may not be *strictly* needed to accomplish a given task
within a given language. However, it may very well still be needed in
order to make said language actually worth switching to.

I can get by with conditional jumps instead of if/else blocks (ex:
Assembly, or old-school BASIC). And I even did for several years. But I
sure as hell won't anymore if I don't have to.

I, and many other people, find metaprogramming to be similarly "One
you try it, you don't want to leave it". Not only does Go not have
metaprogramming, but it doesn't even have the limited form of
metaprogramming, generics, that's already common in many other
languages. Therefore, the onus is on Go (or any other language that
lacks generics), to show that there's something about the langauge that
makes that sacrifice either worthwhile or at least somehow irrelevent.