D vs Go on reddit

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 10/02/2011 21:38, Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote:
> 2011/2/10 Bruno Medeiros<brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail>:
>> I'm very much a fan of simple and orthogonal languages. But this statement
>> has a big problem: it's not clear what one actually considers to be "simple"
>> and "orthogonal". What people consider to be orthogonal can vary not only a
>> little, but actually a lot. Sometimes it can actually vary so much as to be
>> on opposite sides. I remember seeing that first hand here on D: two people
>> were arguing for opposing things in D (I don't remember the particular
>> issue, but one was probably a greater language change, the other as for the
>> status quo, or a minor change from the status quo), and explicitly argued
>> that their alternative was more orthogonal! I remember thinking that one was
>> stretching the notion of orthogonality a bit further than the other, but I
>> didn't find any of them to actually be incorrect.
>
> For the sake of discussion I'll define orthogonal as "non-redundant".
> For instance, orthogonal dimensions in a coordinate-system is when the
> dimension is completely unrelated to other dimensions, i.e. there is
> no redundancy in the coordinate-system. Likewise orthogonality in a
> language in my definition means it does not have redundancy in
> features.
>
> Now, the problem with orthogonality is that, it is not good for
> exploiting 80/20 optimisations.
>
> Example: for most (imperative) languages, you'll somewhere have the
> general way of iteration;
>
> list x;
> int i = 0;
> while (i<  x.length) {
>    // do something with x[i];
>    i++;
> }
>
> Now, if the language is truly orthogonal, you cannot add the "foreach
> (x in list)"-feature, since it's a redundant way of doing a subset of
> the same things. Yet, it's highly likely practical thinking says that
> for most programs in the language, 95% of all iteration will be
> list-iteration, where the foreach-version is both shorter to write,
> easier to read, and not as prone to a typo.

Ok. However, my notion of orthogonality is fairly different from that one.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer