D vs Go on reddit

[retard]

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:38:03 +0100, 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.

There is no need to guess what orthogonality means in computer science, 
the definition is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Orthogonality#Computer_science

For example if the language has both the if() statement and ? : 
expression, you could rename ? : into if() else and overload the keywords 
to mean both expression and a non-returning statement. Now it only has 
one construct, which is more powerful than than any of the previous two.