D vs Go in real life

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/6/13 5:38 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 08:26 +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> […]
>> I rather use D than Go, but it has more to do with Go's community
>> with their religion decisions about generics, dynamic loading,
>> exceptions, enumerations, package management than anything else.
>
> I find the Go community excellent. The mailing list is only a small part
> of the community. Try coming to one of the monthly Go user group
> meetings in London.

Online fora are the universal place where the community meets.

> All communities are "religious". This D community takes religious
> decisions just as much as the Go, Scala, C++, etc. ones.

I disagree with this relativism that makes all language communities 
somehow idempotent. Programming languages' communities are very strongly 
influenced by their leaders. I'm friends with Walter so I can't be 
objective on that one, but let me just say his core values are well 
propagated within the community. I'll abstain to comment much about the 
Go community beyond this: it doesn't seem my cup of tea (even leaving 
aside technical issues).

> The position on
> generics is not strange if you understand the Go language, it's
> computational model and philosophy. Go is taking a non-standard
> position, but it is not wrong, it just means that approaches to
> algorithms you would take in Ada, C++, D, Rust, Java, Scala, etc. do not
> apply directly to Go. It is a shift of mindset and view. If this doesn't
> work for you, fine.

I also disagree with this "agree to disagree" that leaves everybody 
vacuously lukewarm. I think there are things that are just right and 
things that are just wrong. Go's team was unable to add generics to the 
language. That locks Go out of a variety of tools and techniques, which 
does not make it only "different", it effectively pauperizes the 
language leaving it the sole advantage that it's smaller. One 
non-technical current that I find quite difficult to like is that the Go 
proponents have not only shun generics, but effectively made it a 
politically incorrect topic in their community. All discussion on 
generics on the go forums are quickly shushed away.

>> Now for those of us that have become used to the niceties the
>> mainstream languages have adopted from academia in the last 30
>> years, Go feels a bit too light.
>
> But for those people seeking a native code language coming from Python,
> Go is a breath of fresh air where D, C++, etc. are claustrophobic
> language stuck in the attitudes of the 1970s.

Interesting. Why would be D in the same category with C++ 
1970s-attidude-wise, and how is Go a breath of fresh air? If anything, 
the latter seems to me it kinda implements ideas that seemed cool in the 
1970s, but nothing since.


Andrei