Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[language_fan]

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:25:46 +0200, Lutger thusly wrote:

> That's a fancy way of saying that anyone who has not studied CS is a
> moron and therefore cannot understand what is good about languages, thus
> they lose any argument automatically. Am I right?

I just recommend learning basic concepts until terms like generational 
garbage collection, closure, register allocation, immutability, loop 
fusion, term rewriting, regular languages, type constructor, virtual 
constructor, and covariance do not scare you anymore.

If something small like optional semicolons or some other syntactic 
nuance prevents you from finishing your job, how the heck are you 
supposed to build any real world programs? Just to put this to some 
perspective, syntax matters, but not much. Nowadays you can easily write 
a tool that parses stuff written in language X and outputs it in pretty 
printed form in language Y. This is what happens on .NET, for instance. 
Most of the languages there are just syntactic skins for the same common 
core language.