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> Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expecte

> Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expected to implement them yourself, for maximum efficiency. "plenty of other languages besides" doesn't matter if those languages aren't being used in practice. Let me list off the top 10 languages (incl markup) from the most recent Stack Overflow survey, specifically the Professional Developers tab. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... * JavaScript * HTML/CSS * SQL * Python * Java * Bash/Shell/PowerShell * C# * PHP * TypeScript * C++ You can argue about the demographics of Stack Overflow or the bias in users who actually respond on these surveys or a million other things. But based on job postings I've seen in the last several years, I'd wager this list is pretty accurate.

gimboland 7y ago
Yeah. You're not wrong. Sadly, while HN is full of people of great technical expertise, it's also full of people whose knee-jerk reaction to reading _anything_ here is to think of how they can say it's wrong, preferably in a way that implies or explicitly states that they're bigger experts than the person they're replying to. I find it very off-putting, personally, but I keep wading through the crap because (thankfully) that's not the whole story.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
Swift is being used in practice and will most likely see more use in the future as Objective-C fades.
- reificator 7y ago
  If you follow the link you'll find Swift is already above Objective-C on that survey, just that neither of them made the top ten.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I did follow the link, but I disagree with your conclusion that being used by at least 6.6% of respondents to make apps for hundereds of millions of users amounts to "not being used in practice".
    - reificator 7y ago
      If you take my comment in isolation, that's a reasonable read. But it was a response to the following comment: > > I could not believe they had not been part of any prior language I'd learned. > Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expected to implement them yourself, for maximum efficiency. With the context of that post, I hope you would understand that I am disagreeing with the insinuation that every programmer has used "Pascal [...] and plenty of other languages besides". You can easily learn five different languages and finally end up in Haskell without having encountered ADTs before.

gimboland 7y ago

Yeah. You're not wrong. Sadly, while HN is full of people of great technical expertise, it's also full of people whose knee-jerk reaction to reading _anything_ here is to think of how they can say it's wrong, preferably in a way that implies or explicitly states that they're bigger experts than the person they're replying to. I find it very off-putting, personally, but I keep wading through the crap because (thankfully) that's not the whole story.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

Swift is being used in practice and will most likely see more use in the future as Objective-C fades.

reificator 7y ago
If you follow the link you'll find Swift is already above Objective-C on that survey, just that neither of them made the top ten.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I did follow the link, but I disagree with your conclusion that being used by at least 6.6% of respondents to make apps for hundereds of millions of users amounts to "not being used in practice".
  - reificator 7y ago
    If you take my comment in isolation, that's a reasonable read. But it was a response to the following comment: > > I could not believe they had not been part of any prior language I'd learned. > Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expected to implement them yourself, for maximum efficiency. With the context of that post, I hope you would understand that I am disagreeing with the insinuation that every programmer has used "Pascal [...] and plenty of other languages besides". You can easily learn five different languages and finally end up in Haskell without having encountered ADTs before.