Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jun 12 04:48:57 PDT 2015


On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 09:26:29 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
> On 11/06/2015 2:30 AM, weaselcat wrote:
>> On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 00:57:34 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 20:14:10 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
>>> wrote:
>>>> Contrary to technical official definition, in REAL WORLD 
>>>> usage, "he"
>>>> is BOTH a masuline AND a gender-neutral pronoun. A few 
>>>> occasional
>>>> nutbags who deliberately ignore the "gender-neutral" 
>>>> possibility in
>>>> order to promote their "you are all sexists" agenda is NO 
>>>> excuse for
>>>> bowing to thier pressure.
>>>
>>> Personally I don't perceive he as ever being gender 
>>> neutral(us native
>>> speaker). If I am trying to be gender neutral then I will use 
>>> "they"
>>> or "that person" or "one". If some one did try to use he in a 
>>> gender
>>> neutral context then I think it would sound weird to me.
>>
>> 'he' has been a gender neutral pronoun for centuries, and as 
>> far as I'm
>> aware this has its roots in latin using 'man'(vir?) as a 
>> gender neutral
>> pronoun.
>
> As far as I know, "he" was not historically gender neutral, but 
> "man" used to be. In Old English, "man" was simply the suffix 
> that meant "person" ("person" being a newer loan word), hence 
> words like "chairman" and "foreman" are gender neutral (The 
> rise of "chairperson" is feminism gone mad (or ignorant) -- she 
> said). The Old English word for man was weiman (or werman), 
> literally a male-person and was probably dropped as in some 
> dialects it would likely be pronounced to similarly to "woman".
>
> A...

"man" is still used as a gender neutral pronoun in German, 
however, for some reason it's frowned upon these days, just like 
"one" in English. It's considered "arrogant" and old fashioned, 
but it's effin useful and solves a lot of problems.

Mind you, decisions made by those who compile dictionaries and 
"standards" are not at all based on the reality of a given 
language. Double negation exists in English (and many other 
languages), but it's stigmati(s|z)ed as being "incorrect". The 
vote was 5 to 4 when this decision was made in England. The 
official reasoning behind it was that minus + minus = plus, i.e. 
"I don't have no money" would mean "I do have money", which is 
complete horsesh*t. Of course it means "I don't have money". The 
real reason, of course, was class snobbery and elitism: double 
negation was and still is commonly used in working class English 
in England (and the US, I think). Ironically enough, double 
negation is obligatory in standard French, while it is not used 
in colloquial French. This shows you how arbitrary these 
standards are. Don't take them too seriously, and don't start 
religious wars about some eggheads' decisions ;)

The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" should 
be "bad English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine, 
although it might make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill 
his tea. But what the Dickens, old chap!


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