Comment by rand0m4r
1 day ago
This was an interesting read and very educational in my case, but each time I read an article criticizing a programming language it's written by someone who hasn't done anything better.
It's a shame because it is just as effective as pissing in the wind.
If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves, I'll ask that you present your body of work of programming language criticisms so I know if you have "produced something better" in the programming language criticism space.
Of course, by your reasoning this also means you yourself have designed a language.
I'll leave out repeating your colorful language if you haven't done any of these things.
> If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves
Actually I think that's a reasonable argument. I've not designed a language myself (other than toy experiments) so I'm hesitant to denigrate other people's design choices because even with my limited experience I'm aware that there are always compromises.
Similarly, I'm not impressed by literary critics whose own writing is unimpressive.
Who would be qualified to judge their those critics’ writing as good or bad? Critics already qualified as good writers? Who vetted them, then? It’d have to be a stream of certified good authors all the way back.
No, I stick by my position. I may not be able to do any better, but I can tell when something’s not good.
(I have no opinion on Go. I’ve barely used it. This is only on the general principle of being able to judge something you couldn’t do yourself. I mean, the Olympics have gymnastic judges who are not gold medalists.)
I’ve never been a rock star, but I think Creed sucks.
I really don’t like your logic. I’m not a Michelin chef, but I’m qualified to say that a restaurant ruined my dessert. While I probably couldn’t make a crème brûlée any better than theirs, I can still tell that they screwed it up compared to their competitor next door.
For example, I love Python, but it’s going to be inherently slow in places because `sum(list)` has to check the type of every single item to see what __add__ function to call. Doesn’t matter if they’re all integers; there’s no way to prove to the interpreter that a string couldn’t have sneaked in there, so the interpreter has to check each and every time.
See? I’ve never written a language, let alone one as popular as Python, but I’m still qualified to point out its shortcomings compared to other languages.