You are a stupid programmer, you can't have that

[bachmeier]

On Saturday, 7 August 2021 at 12:15:15 UTC, IGotD- wrote:

> Somewhat related. when Java was designed, the designer (James 
> Gosling I believe) claimed that programmers were too stupid to 
> understand the difference between signed and unsigned math 
> (despite often several years of university education) and 
> removed signed math entirely from the language. The impact is 
> that when unsigned math is required, you are forced to 
> conversions and library solutions. Not ideal when an HW APIs 
> deals with unsigned numbers for example.

Programmers are humans that write programs. I've surely written 
more than a million lines of code in my life (who knows how much, 
but that's definitely a lower bound) and I did not study unsigned 
math in college. I took one programming class and I've done a lot 
of independent study. Maybe I could figure out how to work with 
unsigned math, but why would I want to? I have better things to 
do with my time.

But set all that aside. Anyone that's taught a university class 
will agree that you can't assume someone understands something 
just because they attended a lecture and took a test over it.

I don't necessarily disagree that there are *some* cases of 
overly restrictive language design. I didn't last very long with 
Go for that reason. I just think unsigned math is not the best 
example. Switching to safe by default would be a better example.