[OT] Why don't you advertise more your language on Quora etc ?

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 2017-03-03 at 09:33 -0800, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 07:12:07PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)
> via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > […]
> Ahh, the memories! (And how I am dating myself... but who
> cares.)  Such
> fond memories of evenings spent poring over AppleSoft code trying for
> the first time in my life to write programs. And those lovely error
> messages with backwards punctuation:
> 
> 	?SYNTAX ERROR
> 
> :-)

Youngster. :-)

Oh for the days when the only error message you ever got was 0c4.

> […]
> I was skeptical of OO, and especially of Java, at the time.  It's
> odd,
> given that I had just been learning C++ in college and was familiar
> with
> OO concepts, but when I saw the way Java pushed for OO to the
> exclusion
> of all else, I balked.  Call me a non-conformist or whatever, but
> every
> time I see too much hype surrounding something, my kneejerk reaction
> is
> to be skeptical of it.  I eschew all bandwagons.

So how come you are on the D bandwagon? ;-)

Having been involved in the OO scene 1983 to well now I guess, yes I
look back on the function/OO war and the religious aspects of it all
with great embarrassment.

> […]
> 
> To be fair, though, Java as a language in and of itself is not bad at
> all. In fact, in its own way, it's a pretty nicely designed language.
> Idealistic, and in some sense approaching perfection. But in an
> idealistic bubble-world kind of way (the ugliest parts of Java, IMO,
> are
> where it has to interact with the real world -- but nevertheless, it
> isn't *bad* in itself).  The mentality and hype of the community
> surrounding it, though, seem to me to have gone off the deep end, and
> have bred rabid zealots, sad to say, to this very day, of the kind of
> calibre you described above.

Whilst I can see that of the 1994 to 2014 period, I am not sure I see
it so much that way now. There are developers in Java shops who are a
bit "jobsworth" and care little for personal development, and they are
the people who refuse to accept the existence of languages other than
Java. However most of the Java folk at the main conferences are
actually JVM folk and they know languages such as Kotlin, Scala,
Clojure, Groovy, Ceylon, Frege, etc. as well as Java. The zealotry,
when present, is more about the JVM than Java per se.

> (I also TA'd a Java course back in the day, and was quite appalled to
> observe the number of thoroughly-confused students who couldn't tell
> control flow from OO, because "classes" had been hammered into their
> heads long before they even understood what a statement was.
> Apparently, imperative statements are non-OO and therefore evil, so
> one
> was supposed to wrap literally everything in classes. Nobody ever
> explained how one would implement class methods without using
> statements, though.  I suppose calling other class methods was
> excepted
> from the "evil" label, but it seemed to escape people's minds that
> eventually nothing would actually get accomplished if all you had was
> an
> infinite regress of calling class methods with no imperative
> statements
> in between. But such was the rabid OO-fanaticism in those days.)

There were, and are, a lot of bad teachers. Overzealous as it seems in
this episode. This does not make "objects first" a bad idea per se, it
just has to be done properly. Just as teaching bottom up from statement
does. A bad teacher can teach any curriculum badly, that should not
reflect on the curriculum.

> […]
> 
> Ha!  Let the rotten tomatoes fly, but I am a skeptic when it comes to
> dub (or any other such tool, really -- I mean no offense to Sonke).
> Sure
> they have their place in large software projects with potentially
> complicated external dependencies, but for Hello World? C'mon, now.
> Whatever happened to just:
> 
> 	import std.stdio;
> 	void main() { writeln("Hello world!"); }
> 
> And seriously, what kind of koolaid have kids these days been fed,
> that
> they can no longer work with the filesystem, but needs to be spoonfed
> by
> some automated tool? Y'know, we can't just like download scriptlike.d
> and put it in a subdir, and then import it. Oh, no, there's no app
> for
> this, and you can't do it by pressing a big red button on your
> handheld
> touchscreen, so it doesn't count. Filesystem? What's that? I only
> know
> of downloading stuff in a browser which magically gets shuffled
> somewhere in the "memory" of my device, that automatically gets found
> when I need to find it because technology is just that cool.  What's
> the
> filesystem thing you speak of? Download folder? What's that?

I am not sure where this one comes from. Here in the UK most 6 year
olds are now happy manipulating filesystems. Sadly Windows ones, but
I'm working on it.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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