Re: Carbon

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Olivier Henley <olivier.henley@gmail.com> writes:
> This is not aggression. We need to stop relativizing definitions.

I would call the first post somewhat aggressive, though not intensely
so.  It dinged on the C++ community ("I find it shocking...") and
suggested by apophasis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis ) that
the Carbon devs should abandon their project and using Ada instead
("that might not be a bad idea").  It also treated some debateable
points as self-evident, such as that enumeration types should always
support 'Image.

It seems reasonable to me for the Carbon forum moderators to disallow
and shut down language debates of any kind, even if they are not
aggressive per se.  We've all seen enough of those to know how they go.
That particular language debate was especially off-topic since it was an
Ada vs C++ comparison on a Carbon forum.  Ada vs Carbon would have been
better.

The second post came across to me as even more aggressive ("Can you
please specify...").  It was full of what is sometimes called
"sea-lioning", a classic passive-aggressive debating technique:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

I didn't read the later posts that were flagged as off-topic, since you
have to be logged in to view them.  It was only after several of them
that the thread was locked.

> Hordes of people wrote that (along those lines --> "Ada typing is
> nonsense, crazy, mad, stupid, etc") and nobody in this community ever
> canceled them by weaponizing, eg.: "it is demeaning to people working
> on the ARG" ... therefore this is aggression.

This is a general, open discussion forum, not the equivalent of an
internal forum of the ARG itself.  I could understand if an internal ARG
forum locked threads calling Ada typing nonsense, crazy, mad, stupid, etc.

> If Ada is not a direct contender to C++ since 1983, I will be damned.

Idk what you mean by that.  Ada and C++ don't aim to do the same things
afaict.  C++ is certainly used for some things where Ada would be
better, like anything involving safety.  It's also used heavily in
e.g. game development, where bugs and crashes won't kill anyone, so
Ada's safety guarantees are less valuable than they are in
e.g. avionics.

> If there is no intentional wordplay between "Rust" and "Carbon", I
> will be damned.

Maybe you are right about that, but it hadn't occurred to me.  Rust is
iron oxide and carbon is a different element.  I liked the wordplay when
someone called a Rust tool "thermite", which is a mixture of iron oxide
and aluminum powder.  There, the connection is more obvious.

> If C++ is "fully baked" and still needs Carbon, I will be damned.

I haven't looked into Carbon much, but C++ is hampered by having to
support 40 years of legacy code.  Carbon doesn't have to be backwards
compatible at the language level, as long as it can interoperate.

Programming C++ by staying in a modern subset fixes some of its issues,
though not all:

https://isocpp.org/blog/2015/09/bjarne-stroustrup-announces-cpp-core-guidelines