4 ms·

Why people with vastly more skill and experience programming and writing programming languages made the decisions they did.

henry700 1y ago
Skill? Go? With the amount of mistakes piling up over the years comparable to PHP at this point? Really??
- philosophty 1y ago
  These guys have each forgotten 10x than you know about programming. https://swtch.com/~rsc/ https://swtch.com/~rsc/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
  - henry700 1y ago
    Fair point. The tragedy is that it could’ve been much more. But that was never the goal...
  - homebrewer 1y ago
    Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).
ameliaquining 1y ago
I meant, which particular design decisions are you accusing people of having failed to comprehend the rationale for?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- philosophty 1y ago
  Whatever design decisions they consider to be weird. Because it probably just means they don't know what the trade offs and goals were.
mrkeen 1y ago
The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption. JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure. It's all up for criticism.
- philosophty 1y ago
  Sure, there are valid criticisms of anything but without understanding they're unlikely to be useful or correct.
  - mrkeen 1y ago
    Without criticism there's no understanding, just propaganda.

henry700 1y ago

Skill? Go? With the amount of mistakes piling up over the years comparable to PHP at this point? Really??

philosophty 1y ago
These guys have each forgotten 10x than you know about programming. https://swtch.com/~rsc/ https://swtch.com/~rsc/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
- henry700 1y ago
  Fair point. The tragedy is that it could’ve been much more. But that was never the goal...
- homebrewer 1y ago
  Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).

ameliaquining 1y ago

I meant, which particular design decisions are you accusing people of having failed to comprehend the rationale for?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
philosophty 1y ago
Whatever design decisions they consider to be weird. Because it probably just means they don't know what the trade offs and goals were.

mrkeen 1y ago

The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption. JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure. It's all up for criticism.

philosophty 1y ago
Sure, there are valid criticisms of anything but without understanding they're unlikely to be useful or correct.
- mrkeen 1y ago
  Without criticism there's no understanding, just propaganda.