On 11/6/13 5:38 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 08:26 +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote:
[…]
I rather use D than Go, but it has more to do with Go's community
with their religion decisions about generics, dynamic loading,
exceptions, enumerations, package management than anything else.
I find the Go community excellent. The mailing list is only a small part
of the community. Try coming to one of the monthly Go user group
meetings in London.
Online fora are the universal place where the community meets.
All communities are "religious". This D community takes religious
decisions just as much as the Go, Scala, C++, etc. ones.
I disagree with this relativism that makes all language communities
somehow idempotent. Programming languages' communities are very strongly
influenced by their leaders. I'm friends with Walter so I can't be
objective on that one, but let me just say his core values are well
propagated within the community. I'll abstain to comment much about the
Go community beyond this: it doesn't seem my cup of tea (even leaving
aside technical issues).
The position on
generics is not strange if you understand the Go language, it's
computational model and philosophy. Go is taking a non-standard
position, but it is not wrong, it just means that approaches to
algorithms you would take in Ada, C++, D, Rust, Java, Scala, etc. do not
apply directly to Go. It is a shift of mindset and view. If this doesn't
work for you, fine.
I also disagree with this "agree to disagree" that leaves everybody
vacuously lukewarm. I think there are things that are just right and
things that are just wrong. Go's team was unable to add generics to the
language. That locks Go out of a variety of tools and techniques, which
does not make it only "different", it effectively pauperizes the
language leaving it the sole advantage that it's smaller. One
non-technical current that I find quite difficult to like is that the Go
proponents have not only shun generics, but effectively made it a
politically incorrect topic in their community. All discussion on
generics on the go forums are quickly shushed away.
Now for those of us that have become used to the niceties the
mainstream languages have adopted from academia in the last 30
years, Go feels a bit too light.
But for those people seeking a native code language coming from Python,
Go is a breath of fresh air where D, C++, etc. are claustrophobic
language stuck in the attitudes of the 1970s.
Interesting. Why would be D in the same category with C++
1970s-attidude-wise, and how is Go a breath of fresh air? If anything,
the latter seems to me it kinda implements ideas that seemed cool in the
1970s, but nothing since.
Andrei
