"The End of Native Code" (OT: Programmer's mentality).

[Dave]

pragma wrote:
> Slashdot had an interesting ask slashdot article yesterday about when is it the
> right time to go whole-hog into interpreted/VM style language development.
> 
> http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/06/06/12/2044245.shtml
> 
> As its an issue that we're all familar with, I figured I'd read and see why this
> article had 1000+ comments.  I was actually quite suprised to find a number of
> people, mostly C++ guys, clamoring for "native compilation plus garbage
> collection" or some variant thereof.  What was also suprising was the number of
> "have you not seen D yet?" replies to these posts, and how well they were modded
> *up*.  As slashdot is peer-moderated, this means that registered users of the
> site had to take the time to hand out positive reviews on those particular
> posts.
> 
> So I have to say: you guys rock.  Remember, slashdot users pretty much hung D
> from the yard-arm on not one but two articles about D.  What I saw today was a

It's funny - in this high-tech business of constant change - how often I 
run into people who are extremely passionate about resisting change 
(myself included). It seems to be something in the makeup of 'techies', 
be it related to computers or not. I think it probably stems mostly from 
two things: 1) people invest a lot of time and effort into their skill 
sets and 2) many technical / engineering types have a "prove-it" 
attitude towards new stuff, especially stuff that may somewhat deprecate 
what has worked well for them in the past.

> subtle, but noticable shift in this attitude.  The word finally seems to be
> getting out.

In this particular case, I think some (many?) C++ coders are kind-of 
spotting the writing on the wall (they and/or C++ needs to change) but 
rightly see that "going whole hog" into things like Perl, Python and/or 
Java for every type of application is not the way to go either.

> 
> - EricAnderton at yahoo