dsimcha Wrote: > 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.)
Didn't want to give that kind of impression. I think "computer engineering" graduates often have a much better view of the software industry than pure computer science graduates. Non-CS people can also be great developers, no doubt. I wanted to point out that bearophile tries to act like a main architect of the D language. I'm overall impressed how well he handles the theoretical side, but the price is that the ideas are always presented like from an ivory tower. Concrete compiler / library patches and better relevance to real "simple" everyday problems would help a lot more. I'll mention one concrete example: typestates. While I think this idea is interesting, I really can't trust bearophile if I want to know if it's a good feature to have and testing it would require studying some small unpopular language (Rust). I don't think the main branch of D is a suitable target for experimenting with this kind of features. If he wants to use them, he could fork D and come back with concrete results. > > 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. I fully agree with this, but just wanted to bring this up because in my opinion he is wasting a lot of time trying to emphasize things which have been noted, but are on the bottom of the current priority list. I don't want to discourage him from posting, but he should also consider the reactions of the audience a bit.
