[Fwd: Re: [go-nuts] Re: Generics false dichotomy]

[logicchains]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 07:45:10 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> It is like traveling back in time when parametric polymorphism 
> was debated in university papers and everyone was inventing 
> their own code generation tool.
>
> Back to mid-90's compiler technology when only Ada supported 
> generics, C++ started to adopt some form of genericity at ISO 
> meetings and everything else where academic languages like 
> Eiffel, Modula-3 or Standadard ML.
>
> We are in 2014, not in the early 90's. So to ignore what 
> happened in mainstream language design in the last 20 years, is 
> nothing more than an opinionated political decision against 
> generics.

I understand the sentiment that it is 'backwards', but what 
exactly on a practical level is harmful about people writing 
their own code generation tools?

On Monday, 17 February 2014 at 22:53:47 UTC, Asman01 wrote:
> I don't think so. Did you know that some of they are the same 
> guys from Bell Labs which created C, UNIX, Plan9, UTF8 etc?

I'm aware of that, but I'm also aware that there are few things 
in the world more agonisingly complex than writing a C++ 
compiler. I think I read Walter say somewhere that it took him 
ten years! That's ten years of domain-specific experience working 
with generics in the language with the most complex 
implementation of generics in existence. My impression is that no 
amount of experience in other aspects of language design would be 
a substitute for this specific experience, and hence I think it 
makes more sense to attribute the effectiveness of D's generics 
implementation to Walter's extensive experience implementing 
generics than to attribute it to generics being easy to implement 
well. If generics are easy to implement, then why isn't there 
another language with the compile-time power of D that's not a 
monster like C++ or a Lisp?