On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 11:18:40 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 10:53:57 UTC, Peter Alexander
My question to you: Is it okay to reject D solely with these
arguments? If not, how is this any different from rejecting Go
solely from its lack of generics?
Because except for Go, all static languages developed after
1990, which managed to gain mainstream use, have some form of
generics.
There's two ways to interpret this sentence:
1. You claim it is okay to reject Go because it differs from
other statically typed languages, or
2. You claim that all statically typed languages must have
generics to be worth using.
I hope it is not 1, and if it is 2 then again, I find this
incredibly unimaginative.
Interestingly, Rob Pike comments on this world view:
http://commandcenter.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
----
"Early in the rollout of Go I was told by someone that he could
not imagine working in a language without generic types. As I
have reported elsewhere, I found that an odd remark.
To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really
liked what the STL does for him in C++. For the purpose of
argument, though, let's take his claim at face value.
What it says is that he finds writing containers like lists of
ints and maps of strings an unbearable burden. I find that an odd
claim. I spend very little of my programming time struggling with
those issues, even in languages without generic types.
But more important, what it says is that types are the way to
lift that burden. Types. Not polymorphic functions or language
primitives or helpers of other kinds, but types.
That's the detail that sticks with me."
----
