I wrote some D today and it's completely blowing my mind. Ever

[Justin Johansson]

language_fan Wrote:

> On Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:35:39 -0400, bearophile wrote:
> 
> > Walter Bright:
> > 
> >> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9qf8i/
> i_wrote_some_d_today_and_its_completely_blowing/
> > 
> > Very nice. Indeed if you come from experience of C, D allows you to
> > write programs in a much faster way. (But C isn't the only language
> > around today, you also have dotnet C#, for example).
> 
> It is funny to note that every time these new fans of D come from the C / 
> C++ / Java community. It is well known that those languages have long 
> been in a stagnant stage and if the developers just had courage to try 
> modern languages, *any* language would have a fresh feel. It is really no 
> wonder that those languages are starting to feel irritating in daily 
> work. I have never heard of a Eiffel / Ada / Erlang / Lisp / Clojure / 
> Scala / Haskell / SML / OCaml / Nemerle /<insert your favorite statically 
> typed compiled language here> zealot who suddenly found the enlightenment 
> in D.


What, "... zealot who suddenly found the enlightenment in D"? (Rhetorical question).

Since when was zealotry (1) regarded as a virtue? (Another rhetorical question).

Now, meaning to be neither rhetorical nor tautologous, my question is:

Was this phrase meant to be oxymoronic or a contradiction in terms (2), or
was it an accidental misuse of the noun (zealot)?


(1) Noun * S: (n) fanaticism, fanatism, zealotry (excessive intolerance of opposing views)

      http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=zealotry


(2) Although a true oxymoron is “something that is surprisingly true, a paradox”,
   modern usage has brought a common misunderstanding as being near synonymous with
   a contradiction. 

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron  (The full Wikipedia article is quite an amusing read).

-- Justin Johansson