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

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 02:34:04 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 02:04:26 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
[snip]

It would have been better if several languages were used in comparison to Go.

Overall the blog post is a bit immature with little rigor and too much emotion. The code comparisons that aren't idiomatic for either language nor behaviorally equivalent.

It reads like a D-zealot had decided to write this blog before they even clicked the download link for the Go compiler. And so, their experience was never going to be anything but negative.

That said, Go is unpleasant and probably the most boring language I've had to write code in.


bye,
lobo

On Wed, 25 Mar 2015 22:30:10 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> Downplaying other languages makes the D crowd look desperate...

and we are. see for example bug#14035. "typesystem? lolwut, never heard about that thing!" that's why i'd better report bugs directly to Kenji: he is a sane person.

On Wednesday, 25 March 2015 at 21:55:53 UTC, Mathias Lang wrote:
> I just wish D examples didn't include string lambdas.
>
+100

On Wed, 2015-03-25 at 14:00 -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/30ad8b/why_gos_design_is_a_disservice_to_intelligent/
> 
> Andrei

The reaction in the Go community to this article has been exactly as one would have anticipated. I paraphrase the common theme thus:  Go is successful in the market, D isn't, therefore Go is a better language than D.  Go does indeed have much greater market penetration, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to deduce the sophistry, and indeed casuistry, in most of the argumentation.

Interestingly, or not, Erlang and Go are bringing better concurrency and parallelism to Java. If there was some design/programming resource, is would be good to revisit D's std.concurrency and std.parallelism, in the light of the fibres stuff, to do something not dissimilar to the Quasar framework so as to provide an integrated actor/dataflow/CSP/data parallelism framework for D. As GPars has shown, trying to do this stuff on volunteer labour alone just doesn't work.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

I wrote the article in a rush last night (girlfriend calling me to bed) and as a result it has a few spelling/grammar errors which I've hopefully corrected.

The article is a total rant about Go after using it over the last month or so for a project. I honestly was getting so bored with Go and the article that I was literally falling asleep writing it. lol! Is started liking Go but after a while I found it increasing difficult trying to change me way of working to shoehorn solutions into such a simple language.

I know it's a bit unfair in places and it's got a click bait title but who cares? I got my point across and I think people understand where i'm coming from. It seems to have got really popular and I've been swamped with mail, etc. I think it's the most read article i've ever written. ha! :o)

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 00:08:28 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 March 2015 at 22:30:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Go has stability, is production ready and has an ecosystem with commercial value.
>
> You could say the same things about Cobol or PHP, but that doesn't mean the languages themselves should be free from criticism.

There is a difference between claiming that language A makes this and that difficult and claiming that language B is better than A. To claim the latter you need to look at comparable larger real world programs and how it fares regarding scaling and maintainability issues.

> My opinion of Go was very much consistent with the article. It doesn't mean much to me to have a stable language that I don't want to use. His points are valid.

I could easily make similar points about D and it's somewhat messed up type system, syntax and libraries. It would be quite easy to convincingly claim that C++/Go/Python are a better languages than D.

The Go designers keep the language small and polish it to production quality before moving on with new features. Some of the Go designers also have acknowledged that exceptions and generics can be useful, but that they don't want to add features until they know it is the right thing to do and how to go about it.

If you aren't making a research language (and D most certainly would fail in that arena) the only thing that matters is how it fares in a production setting by programmers who do full time programming in the language.

On Wednesday, 25 March 2015 at 22:30:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Downplaying other languages makes the D crowd look desperate...

Heh, there were whole sites like phpain (can't find it now) and something similar for C++.

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 10:17:42 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 March 2015 at 22:30:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Downplaying other languages makes the D crowd look desperate...
>
> Heh, there were whole sites like phpain (can't find it now) and something similar for C++.

It happens in the IDE world too.

http://www.ihateeclipse.com/


As physics student new to programming I agree with most of the Go comments in the blog.

bye,
Amber

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 06:05:25 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Mar 2015 22:30:10 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>
>> Downplaying other languages makes the D crowd look desperate...
>
> and we are. see for example bug#14035. "typesystem? lolwut, never heard
> about that thing!" that's why i'd better report bugs directly to Kenji:
> he is a sane person.

D most certainly needs stronger typing, not sure why it tries to propagate the weak typing of C. I find myself adding extra template parameters and "explicit" in my C++ code just to get stronger typing. New AoT languages ought to do better than C++.

What Go really got right was to have untyped literals. If you combine that with a orthogonal weak-cast operator with pleasant syntax then you have something.

Strong explicit typing also makes it possible to overload on return values... Something I really want to see in a C++ replacement language.