On Friday, 26 July 2013 at 14:17:45 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Friday, 26 July 2013 at 14:05:12 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 03:18:03PM +0200, Chris wrote:
[...]
I have learned to be wary of comparisons like that. Any
language
that is sponsored or owned by a big company always
"outperforms"
other languages, and at the end of the day they only want to
bind
you to their products, no matter how "open source" they are.
+1.
I'm skeptical of attempts to reduce everything down a single
number or
three, that can serve as a basis for numerical (or hand-waving)
comparisons. As if programming languages were that simple that
one could
place them neatly on what is effectively a scale of 1 to 10!
You can basically proof whatever you want. Most of the
discussions I
have had don't revolve around whether the language is good or
not,
it's about what people have heard/read, "Who uses it?", "I've
heard
..." "Someone said ..." I once told a guy about D. He said
"Ah, D,
old-fashioned!" and he showed me a link that said "C# has a
more
modern feature ... bla bla". How ... scientific!
I get that a lot from Java fanboys. They make bold-sounding
statements
like "Java is the future!", "Java is the best!", "D sucks,
nobody uses
it!", "Java will get you a job easily!". But I've yet to hear
some
factual evidence to back up these claims. Well, maybe except
the last
one -- it's true that given Java's popularity, it has a high
chance of
landing you a job. But the point is, just because it will land
you a job
doesn't necessarily make it a *good* language, it merely shows
that it's
a *popular* one. Popular doesn't imply good.
T
Yep. And I think that someone who knows D or any other language
that is not mainstream is seriously into programming. If you
know Java or Python, what does that mean? That you are a good
programmer? If you know how to program, you can learn any
language you want. The question is usually not "I wonder if I
can write the program." the question is usally "I know what I
have to do. But how do I do it in D, C, Java ...?" It's the
how, not the if.
If I think about it, learning and knowing languages makes you a
better programmer. If you know D, you become a better programmer
in general. If you learn Objective-C or C or whatever, you become
a better programmer. You learn new concepts and know what works
and what doesn't, rather than sheepishly following rules as if
they were universal laws. Ok, that's a bit off topic now.
