4 ms·

I hear what you are saying but there is the other side. Perhaps the opinion/feeling you are having is related to getting older. We've learned a lot about what

I hear what you are saying but there is the other side. Perhaps the opinion/feeling you are having is related to getting older. We've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in programming languages. Goto considered harmful and all that kind of stuff. If you want to get a Lisp/Haskell fanatic really going point out how so many of the features in those languages have finally made their way into mainstream languages (lambdas, etc.). What we don't often consider are all of the language features that didn't make it. This process didn't stop sometime in the past. It is happening right now. That feeling of unease may not be an indication of the quality of the features you are considering. It may largely be uncertainty about what features will or will not stand the test of time. Perhaps as we get older, we want languages that have all of the good stuff we've learned from the past and none of the experimental stuff that we aren't too sure about yet. That might be because we are starting to notice that we won't have enough time left in our remaining days to sort all the new toys into the good/bad bin.

refulgentis 2y ago
Stirring call to action for creativity, but it is unclear how a comment that boils down to "new things might be good" applies in this context. as OP refers to, custom operators are considered harmful in languages ranging from C++ to Swift. It's a great contemporary example of goto.
- zoogeny 2y ago
  I suppose the more poetic: "don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin" is another way to state it. It isn't "new things might be good" it is more a reminder that your self-described feeling of unease may say more about you than it does about the language feature under question. I've seen some horrors in my time due to custom operators. I've also suffered through some horrors when they are missing and would clearly be appropriate. They seem appropriate for linear algebra libraries for example. Not everyone agrees, obviously. As an aside, I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos of people programming C. I notice that goto shows up very frequently, especially in modern C. Usually it is a label at the end of a function to manage resource cleanup before returning, almost like a manual `defer`. Sometimes it is to break out of nested loops. I mean, I've always taken Dijkstra's point to be that long jumping out of a procedural boundary was the real problem, not the keyword "goto". And built-in language features that obviate the need to use goto even for the reasonable use cases are my preference. I feel the same about custom infix operators. I too share an unease about them. But I have to admit they feel right sometimes. I admit I don't have enough information on their use in this kind of case to know if it is one of the good ones or one of the bad ones.

refulgentis 2y ago

Stirring call to action for creativity, but it is unclear how a comment that boils down to "new things might be good" applies in this context. as OP refers to, custom operators are considered harmful in languages ranging from C++ to Swift. It's a great contemporary example of goto.

zoogeny 2y ago
I suppose the more poetic: "don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin" is another way to state it. It isn't "new things might be good" it is more a reminder that your self-described feeling of unease may say more about you than it does about the language feature under question. I've seen some horrors in my time due to custom operators. I've also suffered through some horrors when they are missing and would clearly be appropriate. They seem appropriate for linear algebra libraries for example. Not everyone agrees, obviously. As an aside, I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos of people programming C. I notice that goto shows up very frequently, especially in modern C. Usually it is a label at the end of a function to manage resource cleanup before returning, almost like a manual `defer`. Sometimes it is to break out of nested loops. I mean, I've always taken Dijkstra's point to be that long jumping out of a procedural boundary was the real problem, not the keyword "goto". And built-in language features that obviate the need to use goto even for the reasonable use cases are my preference. I feel the same about custom infix operators. I too share an unease about them. But I have to admit they feel right sometimes. I admit I don't have enough information on their use in this kind of case to know if it is one of the good ones or one of the bad ones.