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I don't think it's such a big issue but it is quite surprising to read, since these concepts have been known and used for many decades :)

coldtea 4y ago
I don't think that the precedent matters that much in this situation, as to whether people would dismiss such an idea or not. People can dismiss language ideas and concepts that "have been known and used for many decades" just the same. For a trivial example: significant whitespace. So, e.g. "Lisp has had that since forever" is not a guarantee people would be OK with it, unless they also like Lisp - not to mention they might not even know about it in Lisp. As for C++, many people consider templates - at least as implemented - a bad idea. So some people knowing that it existed in C++ already, and considering it a bad idea to have in Zig is not contradictory.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Sure but then it's like... for example, if you land rockets and your advertisement says "People told me it couldn't be done!", then fair enough. But if you, say, build an electric car and your advertisement says "People told me it couldn't be done!", then ... who exactly have you been talking to? The phrase "They said it couldn't be done!" is an evocative proxy for technological novelty. If the experts are not representative, the claim of novelty will be misleading.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    yeah, though in this case they didn't say "it can't be done" or "was never done" - just that it is a "really dumb idea". At least that's what the post claims they said.
    - belmarca 4y ago
      Which is precisely my point. As one other commenter said: "who have you been talking to?". Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general, maybe those experts were talking about a very particular problem? It's not clear.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        >Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general Well, it did create a big mess and overhead in C++ for one (not to mention adding another turing-complete language on top of it)...
        belmarca 4y ago
        Ah but that's an implementation and design choice issue. It's like saying "classes are a bad idea because implementing them in pure C is cumbersome".
        coldtea 4y ago
        Well, to criticize something people start (and, often, end) on concrete examples they've seen it in practice. And for "compile time code generation" C++ templates are an example they'd be familiar with (perhaps the canonical one, as more people know C++ than Lisp).
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

coldtea 4y ago

I don't think that the precedent matters that much in this situation, as to whether people would dismiss such an idea or not. People can dismiss language ideas and concepts that "have been known and used for many decades" just the same. For a trivial example: significant whitespace. So, e.g. "Lisp has had that since forever" is not a guarantee people would be OK with it, unless they also like Lisp - not to mention they might not even know about it in Lisp. As for C++, many people consider templates - at least as implemented - a bad idea. So some people knowing that it existed in C++ already, and considering it a bad idea to have in Zig is not contradictory.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
Sure but then it's like... for example, if you land rockets and your advertisement says "People told me it couldn't be done!", then fair enough. But if you, say, build an electric car and your advertisement says "People told me it couldn't be done!", then ... who exactly have you been talking to? The phrase "They said it couldn't be done!" is an evocative proxy for technological novelty. If the experts are not representative, the claim of novelty will be misleading.
- coldtea 4y ago
  yeah, though in this case they didn't say "it can't be done" or "was never done" - just that it is a "really dumb idea". At least that's what the post claims they said.
  - belmarca 4y ago
    Which is precisely my point. As one other commenter said: "who have you been talking to?". Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general, maybe those experts were talking about a very particular problem? It's not clear.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general Well, it did create a big mess and overhead in C++ for one (not to mention adding another turing-complete language on top of it)...
      - belmarca 4y ago
        Ah but that's an implementation and design choice issue. It's like saying "classes are a bad idea because implementing them in pure C is cumbersome".
        coldtea 4y ago
        Well, to criticize something people start (and, often, end) on concrete examples they've seen it in practice. And for "compile time code generation" C++ templates are an example they'd be familiar with (perhaps the canonical one, as more people know C++ than Lisp).
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]