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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
by 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 agoyeah, 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 agoWhich 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 agoAh 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 agoWell, 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]