GCC 4.6

[dsimcha]

On 3/28/2011 9:54 PM, jasonw wrote:
> Listen kid, you're some biology student, right? You're just coding for fun. And more importantly, you haven't participated in any long term real world systems programming projects. This kind of work experience doesn't give you the competence to evaluate the knowledge and work of people with tens of years of programming experience under their belt.
>
> You might be terribly smart, but you're missing the point. Can you see what we are building here? A whole language ecosystem. Andrei has done great work by attracting competent CS persons in to the community.

While I think some good points were raised here, I find the implication 
that biologists and generally non-CS people can't do first rate 
programming mildly offensive.  Formal education in CS helps especially 
when doing CS research, but it's not a requirement for being a "real" 
programmer.  I'm a biomedical engineering student and primarily write 
research and hobby code, not industrial code.  Walter's degree is in 
mechanical engineering and he's one of the best programmers I can think 
of.  Heck, even Andrei didn't have a formal degree in CS until recently. 
  (His undergrad, IIRC, is in electrical engineering.)

That said, I think bearophile's posts are well-intentioned.  The problem 
is that the signal-to-noise is terrible.  What D needs now is bug fixing 
of what's already there and solid implementations of basic stuff like 
database APIs, better garbage collection, IDEs, etc.  Bringing up the 
latest cool idea is fine if you've also got an implementation or it's 
exceptionally well thought out and solves a severe, pressing problem. 
The constant bombardment with ideas to solve minor or niche problems, 
with no implementation and no intention of creating an implementation, 
is more distracting than useful.