Comment by kunley
3 months ago
Inexperience of an author who develops quite successful programming language for like 10 years? Quite a bold statement.
Actually his perspective is quite reasonable. Go is in the other part of the spectrum than languages encouraging "left-pad"-type of libraries, and this is a good thing.
Not to mention we've have had decades of software development without automated package managers and people did just fine.
I've seen plenty of intelligent people acting pretty stupid.
As my psychology professor used to say. "Smart is how efficiently use your intelligence. Or don't."
So someone pretty low IQ can be smart - Forrest Gump. Or someone high IQ can be dumb occasionally - a professor so very attuned to his research topic at expense of everything else.
How is this relating to the alleged inexperience of the original author? Not sure what do you mean.
The above comment is merely pointing out that a 10y+ experienced language designer can still have naive viewpoints on application development. Anyone who's built a non-trivial userspace application knows that realistically you'll have to reach outside a particular languages standard library in most cases to provide value without reinventing wheels.
In other words: when someone's knowledge is disproportionately localized/siloed to their prospective subfield or domain of expertise, it does not necessitate generalization to others.
I'm certainly not saying this is the case with this particular individual, as I'm personally not familiar with their background. I'm simply stating that it's a plausible explanation for when experts in one domain make naive assertions about another domain they might not have the same experience in.
11 replies →
Thank you?
Is it "quite successful"? How would I distinguish such a "quite successful" language from say Hare or V or are these all "successful" in your mind?
I know very few people using Hare, especially since it only works on "FOSS platforms". And I will still maintain that V is vapourware. They still have the same false claims on the website that they've had from the beginning for ~6 years.
Odin is "successful enough" so far. Also, you know about it, so that says something.
I know about Hare and V too, so, then what exactly does it say for me to know about a programming language? Not much.
I have technically written more Odin than Hare (one Godbolt example, arguably two if you count my explaining how to modify the example to illustrate another problem) but that just means I have more justification to say I don't like it.
I've written a lot more Scheme and I had so thoroughly forgotten writing Scheme that I had to go read the source for myself when I got email about it decades later to be sure it wasn't just a coincidence of author names.
I'm not convinced there is space for any of the "C successor" languages in the twenty-first century and in the event space is made or given for one I doubt there'll somehow be room for more. So with today's field I would bet on Zig.
1 reply →
There's commercial software produced in Odin that has made money. Not sure the same can be said of Hare or V.
Why the need for distinguishing and an urge for comparison? We're talking about Odin, that's it. As a project that (as I understand) didn't have any big corp investment, it's impressive.
The claim was that we should assume Odin's author is experienced because he wrote a successful language. If we've decided it doesn't matter whether it's successful then the claim was entirely circular. Yes, the creator of Odin is indeed its creator. Nobody was disputing that.
1 reply →