On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 06:11:30 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
(Had to look up that name) Ahh, I see. That explains the
dismissal of
metaprogramming and generics, and the dismissal Go's objectors
via a roundabout strawman (Ie by complaining about the act of
complaining, and by categorizing of Go's complaints as merely
programmers loving to complain for the sake of complaining).
(And yea, I see the "[generics] are a fine thing", but he's
still
overall very dismissive of their importance.)
He's not dismissive of their importance. The point was that if
you can dismiss a language based solely on its lack of generics
then you are essentially admitting that you have very little
imagination as a programmer. You are admitting that the only way
you can do productive, meaningful work is if you have generics.
It's worth pointing out that a large fraction of (most?)
programming languages do not have generics, yet people seem to be
able to do meaningful work in them.
I imagine that the less imaginative hardcore Go programmers will
look at D and say things like "wow, how can D programmers work
without channels?", and maybe the Lisp programmers say "wow, how
can D programmers work without homoiconic representation", and
maybe the Haskell programmers say "wow, how can D programmers
work with only crappy local type inference?"
As you can see, no matter what you think of these features, the
arguments are pointless because it is very clear that you can do
meaningful work without them. We get by without channels,
homoiconicity, and full program type inference; just as the Go
programmers get by without generics.
