4 ms·

I'm not a systems level programmer but I personally super appreciate this kind of dialog and communication about the flaws in the programming language from prom

I'm not a systems level programmer but I personally super appreciate this kind of dialog and communication about the flaws in the programming language from prominent members in the community. I've seen it a lot more in Rust (and C++) than in most other languages. I wonder if there is a correlation between how much a language grows and changes to how many blog posts there are from prominent members in the language community outlining flaws? (Tangentially, I would love for a search engine where I could track metadata like this) I personally think that way too often the discourse from the core team / stewards / BDFLs etc is wholly positive about their own community + the technical merits of the programming language they are representing. A healthy dose of "here are some flaws" is very refreshing and humbling, and makes me appreciate the community more.

TheDong 5y ago
If you want a couple other examples here's what I've got offhand.. Perhaps the original example, Hoare helped popularize null pointers, and then gave the "Null Pointers: The Billion Dollar Mistake" talk https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill... The creator of nodejs talking about some of its mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA Nada Amin was part of the Scala team, and also wrote a wonderful paper about how Scala's type-system is fundamentally unsound: https://namin.seas.harvard.edu/publications/java-and-scalas-type-systems-are-unsound-existential-crisis-null-pointers https://namin.seas.harvard.edu/publications/java-and-scalas-... bradfitz was a core go team member, and wrote a post about what their net.IP type got wrong https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go/ https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go/ I have no doubt there's many more examples too, but those are the ones I can think of offhand.

TheDong 5y ago

If you want a couple other examples here's what I've got offhand.. Perhaps the original example, Hoare helped popularize null pointers, and then gave the "Null Pointers: The Billion Dollar Mistake" talk https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill... The creator of nodejs talking about some of its mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA Nada Amin was part of the Scala team, and also wrote a wonderful paper about how Scala's type-system is fundamentally unsound: https://namin.seas.harvard.edu/publications/java-and-scalas-type-systems-are-unsound-existential-crisis-null-pointers https://namin.seas.harvard.edu/publications/java-and-scalas-... bradfitz was a core go team member, and wrote a post about what their net.IP type got wrong https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go/ https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go/ I have no doubt there's many more examples too, but those are the ones I can think of offhand.