On 7/17/2011 2:33 PM, Craig Latta wrote:
That talk would have been a whole lot better if he had grounded it
with a discussion of how constraints are good for creativity. It's how
he should have spent the time where he went on about memorizing Pi for
no good reason...
if memorizing pie is a measure of programmer status, it likely puts down
those of us who only know 10s of digits of Pi...
granted, it is probably not that terribly important to know far more
digits of pie than can be reasonably represented in a sanely-sized
floating point constant.
funny though is I don't really believe in taking things away from
languages, rather just providing ideally clean and concise constructs to
take over the role of more hairy constructs.
for example, if/while/for/... don't mean goto shouldn't exist in a
language or should be branded as "evil" as a result, rather they provide
better alternatives such that things like goto are more of a "break
glass in case of emergency" feature (or can be taken as a sign that,
when one finds themselves using it, then likely things have already gone
fairly far south as far as this particular code is concerned...).
so, I think it is more about providing better and cleaner alternatives
to common problems than in trying to take things away.
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