On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 02:04:26 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
You describe these as issues forming part of a critique and
suggesting the substance of what he wrote is wrong, but are
these substantive in the context of a quick blog post (where it
is more important to say something generative than to be
perfect in its expression).
The comparison, as-is, is unfair. He writes a long-winded Go
snippet (which it turns out is completely unrepresentative of an
idiomatic Go solution[1]) then counters it with a short D
solution that deceptively does less work.
I did not mean to suggest his overall claims are wrong; I
strongly agree with him on his main points. The problem is that
he's using faulty data to reach that conclusion.
I don't claim to know Go, but is his basic point off the mark?
At the very least, he's completely misrepresented the difference
with the unnaturally long Go snippet[1] and the incomplete D
snippet.
stderr.writeln(text);
return 1;
correctness is important, but does this change much?
The size of the code is an essential point in this post. It's
probably safe to say most readers can't spot the difference in
semantics, which makes Go look disproportionally verbose.
In the second example maybe you should print four lists to be
equivalent of the Go code. I think it's misrepresentative to
shorten the D example by making it do less work.
surely people can see beyond a difference of three lines ?
would this change his point?
I think it makes a big difference visually.
fair point if true (I will let others who know better say
whether .array. or something is needed).
join and array on byLine both suffer the same problem. Using
joiner instead of join would fix it and still allow it to forego
copying each line.
What he wrote is correct English, and he is an Englishman
living in England.
Great.
Again, nobody English would think this was more than mildly
humorous (and by no means insulting). To suggest somebody is
rabid is not to insult their intelligence, but merely to tease
them about their likely strong emotional reaction.
I wasn't referring to that, I was referring to the grammatical
error in the quote.
But what is one to do when making the trade-off between being
blandly corporate and acceptable to everyone, versus writing
with some character and spirit and offending the sensitive.
It's a personal choice, but not easy to criticize another for
theirs.
I personally find the world too bland these days. One cannot
police the forms of expression of people who do not speak for a
community or claim to be acting as such (apologies if I am
mistaken and he does have an official position within D). And
perhaps one ought not to try.
I intentionally did not want to criticize his post as a whole,
just the methodology employed. The post has been met with a lot
of scorn on Reddit, and I think it would help D's case to get the
facts right.
[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/30ad8b/why_gos_design_is_a_disservice_to_intelligent/cpqpfjx
