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Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

An appeal to authority is not an argumentative fallacy if the authority is, umm, actually qualified to talk about whatever they're saying. There are at most a couple dozen people more qualified and able to talk about the upsides and downsides of programming languages who, moreover, have seen them in action in the course of several decades of computing history (much of which was directly due to this man's actions).

Really, if you have a language, compiler, and operating systems designer of the caliber of Rob Pike saying that generics introduce a lot of issues, I'm going to need some damned good evidence to the contrary.

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Yes, it is still a fallacy. If you have an argument, you can make it without trying to rely on "famous person X agrees". And you seem to be confused about who Rob Pike is. He simply worked at bell labs. After everything important had already happened. He had nothing to do with the creation of unix or C, he just gets lumped in with them because he was at bell labs after the fact.

From Wikipedia:

"He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in AT&T's US patent 4,555,775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents. [1]

Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam and acme are the most well known and are still in active use and development.

Pike, with Brian Kernighan, is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment. With Ken Thompson he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying images of faces of email authors."

Yeah, some amateur engineering right there. My point still stands; heuristically I have every reason to believe an extremely competent arquitect and designer who is involved in good faith on this project over a random commententer who can't be bothered to assess the evidence.

It seems to me that Pike and gang are mainly coming from a C background. They loathe C++ and Java. Take a look at the SPLASH talk linked in another comment here, and see how the "pain points" mentioned either apply mainly to C and C++ (dependency issues, build times in the case of the latter), or are independent of the language in general (like poor documentation). Then at least 4 sections on that page are just related to dependencies and build times (about 1/3rd of the entire article).

No one is denying that C and C++ have many problems. At the same time though, many of those problems have been solved in other languages (both older and newer than C++).

Did you seriously not notice how nothing in your list of accomplishments is even remotely relevant? We're talking about programming language research, and Pike's experience in that area is seriously lacking.

You don't need to believe anyone, that is the whole point. You are trying to turn it into "some guy's opinion vs the glorious and all-knowing rob's opinion". It is not a question of opinion, it is one of fact. Again, this problem was solved in 1976. ML is very old. Go read the papers on parametric polymorphism.

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