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.
