Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
<roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> It did not hit a sweet spot. It was born there. (I do not think it would
> have much momentum if not for that reason.)

It seems very much a Rob Pike project, and he is a man of strong
opinions (that date module was his idea ;))  Which is actually not
bad, really; his team delivered a solid language in a few years, which
is pretty fast for a PL.  Not everyone likes his opinions, but that's
fine.  Main problem is when opinion in language design excludes
possibilities of further growth.

Java is another opinionated language (one of its opinions is that
normal people can't be trusted with unsigned arithmetic, for instance)
which was kept back because its designers refused to consider
functions as first class values.  This became entrenched after the C#
schism - Gosling called Heljsberg the "method pointer man".  However,
the C# rivalry generally has been good for Java.