Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 14 June 2015 at 09:38:02 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
> On 12/06/2015 12:48 PM, Chris wrote:
>> "man" is still used as a gender neutral pronoun in German, 
>> however, for
>> some reason it's frowned upon these days, just like "one" in 
>> English.
>> It's considered "arrogant" and old fashioned, but it's effin 
>> useful and
>> solves a lot of problems.
>>
>> Mind you, decisions made by those who compile dictionaries and
>> "standards" are not at all based on the reality of a given 
>> language.
>> Double negation exists in English (and many other languages), 
>> but it's
>> stigmati(s|z)ed as being "incorrect". The vote was 5 to 4 when 
>> this
>> decision was made in England. The official reasoning behind it 
>> was that
>> minus + minus = plus, i.e. "I don't have no money" would mean 
>> "I do have
>> money", which is complete horsesh*t. Of course it means "I 
>> don't have
>> money". The real reason, of course, was class snobbery and 
>> elitism:
>> double negation was and still is commonly used in working 
>> class English
>> in England (and the US, I think). Ironically enough, double 
>> negation is
>> obligatory in standard French, while it is not used in 
>> colloquial
>> French. This shows you how arbitrary these standards are. 
>> Don't take
>> them too seriously, and don't start religious wars about some 
>> eggheads'
>> decisions ;)
>>
>> The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" 
>> should be "bad
>> English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine, although 
>> it might
>> make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill his tea. But 
>> what the
>> Dickens, old chap!
>
> I must be rare, cos I ain't posh n' well educated but I deplore 
> the use of double negatives in English. I might be heard t'say 
> "I ain't got n' money" (cos it be true) but in that case the 
> "n'" is the local dialect contraction of "any". Other areas of 
> the UK can't use the same excuse, maybe they got it from us but 
> didn't understand what we were say'n, which is very common, but 
> am more inclined to blame ignorance.
>
> Don't know anything about double negative usage in French, but 
> I do know that they are a way making super polite requests in 
> Japanese.
>
> Lets all not not stop arguing the minutia.
>
> A...

Then generations of music fans were baffled by lyrics like "I 
ain't got no money to show" (Double trouble), "I can't get no 
satisfaction". To use "any" ain't no better, because it still is 
a double negative. I'll give you Pinker's explanation:

"At this point, defenders of the standard are likely to pull out 
the notorious  double negative, as in I can't get no 
satisfaction. Logically speaking, the two negatives cancel each 
other out,
they teach; Mr. Jagger is actually saying that he is satisfied. 
The song should be entitled "I Can't Get Any Satisfaction." But 
this reasoning is not satisfactory. Hundreds of languages require 
their speakers to use a negative element somewhere within the 
"scope," as linguists call it, of a negated verb.

The so-called double negative, far from being a corruption, was
the norm in Chaucer's Middle English, and negation in standard 
French—as in Je ne sais pas, where ne and pas
are both negative—is a familiar contemporary example.
Come to think of it, Standard English is really no different. 
What do any, even, and at all mean in the following sentences?

I didn't buy any lottery tickets.
I didn't eat even a single French fry.
I didn't eat fried food at all today.

Clearly, not much: you can't use them alone, as the following 
strange sentences show:

I bought any lottery tickets.
I ate even a single French fry.
I ate fried food at all today.

What these words are doing is exactly what no is doing in 
nonstandard American English, such as in the equivalent
I didn't buy no lottery tickets—agreeing with the negated verb. 
The slim difference is that nonstandard English co-opted the word 
no as the agreement element,  whereas Standard English co-opted 
the word any ; aside from that, they are pretty much
translations. And one more point has to be made. In the grammar 
of standard English, a double negative does
not assert the corresponding affirmative. No one would dream of 
saying  I can't get no satisfaction out of the blue to boast that 
he easily attains contentment. There are circumstances in which 
one might use the construction to deny a preceding
negation in the discourse, but denying a negation is not the same 
as asserting an affirmative, and even then one could probably 
only use it by putting heavy stress on the negative
element, as in the following contrived example:

As hard as I try not to be smug about the misfortunes of my 
adversaries, I must admit that I can't get no satisfaction out of 
his tenure denial.

So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead to 
confusion is pure pedantry."

http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~sih01001/english/fall2007/TheLanguageMavens.pdf