[OT] Why don't you advertise more your language on Quora etc ?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 05:26:08PM +0000, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 2017-03-03 at 09:33 -0800, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 07:12:07PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)
> > via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > > […]
> > Ahh, the memories! (And how I am dating myself... but who
> > cares.)  Such fond memories of evenings spent poring over AppleSoft
> > code trying for the first time in my life to write programs. And
> > those lovely error messages with backwards punctuation:
> > 
> > 	?SYNTAX ERROR
> > 
> > :-)
> 
> Youngster. :-)
> 
> Oh for the days when the only error message you ever got was 0c4.

I bow before your venerable age! :-P


> > […]
> > I was skeptical of OO, and especially of Java, at the time.  It's
> > odd, given that I had just been learning C++ in college and was
> > familiar with OO concepts, but when I saw the way Java pushed for OO
> > to the exclusion of all else, I balked.  Call me a non-conformist or
> > whatever, but every time I see too much hype surrounding something,
> > my kneejerk reaction is to be skeptical of it.  I eschew all
> > bandwagons.
> 
> So how come you are on the D bandwagon? ;-)
[...]

Haha, you got me there.

Though truth be told, I only chose D after a long search for a better
language and finding nothing that more closely matches my ideal of what
a programming language should be.  And at the time, there wasn't much
hype surrounding D at all (in fact, I would never have found it had I
not been actively searching for new programming languages).


[...]
> > To be fair, though, Java as a language in and of itself is not bad
> > at all. [...]  The mentality and hype of the community surrounding
> > it, though, seem to me to have gone off the deep end, and have bred
> > rabid zealots, sad to say, to this very day, of the kind of calibre
> > you described above.
> 
> Whilst I can see that of the 1994 to 2014 period, I am not sure I see
> it so much that way now. There are developers in Java shops who are a
> bit "jobsworth" and care little for personal development, and they are
> the people who refuse to accept the existence of languages other than
> Java. However most of the Java folk at the main conferences are
> actually JVM folk and they know languages such as Kotlin, Scala,
> Clojure, Groovy, Ceylon, Frege, etc. as well as Java. The zealotry,
> when present, is more about the JVM than Java per se.

Perhaps my perception is colored by a close acquiantance who happens to
be a Java zealot to this very day. :-P  JVM zealotry, OTOH, I don't see
very much at all. In fact, I've never even heard such a term until you
said it.


> > (I also TA'd a Java course back in the day, and was quite appalled
> > to observe the number of thoroughly-confused students who couldn't
> > tell control flow from OO, because "classes" had been hammered into
> > their heads long before they even understood what a statement was.
> > Apparently, imperative statements are non-OO and therefore evil, so
> > one was supposed to wrap literally everything in classes. Nobody
> > ever explained how one would implement class methods without using
> > statements, though.  I suppose calling other class methods was
> > excepted from the "evil" label, but it seemed to escape people's
> > minds that eventually nothing would actually get accomplished if all
> > you had was an infinite regress of calling class methods with no
> > imperative statements in between. But such was the rabid
> > OO-fanaticism in those days.)
> 
> There were, and are, a lot of bad teachers. Overzealous as it seems in
> this episode. This does not make "objects first" a bad idea per se, it
> just has to be done properly. Just as teaching bottom up from
> statement does. A bad teacher can teach any curriculum badly, that
> should not reflect on the curriculum.
[...]

The thing that gets to me is that these teachers, good or bad, committed
the fallacy of embracing a single paradigm to the exclusion of
everything else, even in the face of obvious cases where said paradigm
didn't fit very well with the problem domain.  Some aspects of Java also
reflect this same fallacy -- such as those ubiquitous singleton static
classes in the OS-wrapping modules, or the impossibility of declaring a
function outside of a class -- which to me are indications that it
wasn't just the teachers, but a more pervasive trend in the Java
ecosystem of putting on OO-centric blinders.


T

-- 
In a world without fences, who needs Windows and Gates? -- Christian Surchi