>>110
Having already mentioned that I don't always expect people to be complete morasses of stupidity, I agree with everything else you've said, wholeheartedly. You have actually summarized what I've said (or intended to say anyway). It too makes my blood boil whenever people blindly refuse to receive new ideas, but what can we do? We ain't responsible for that, anyway. I strive to save my energy for people which are worth any cause.
The C++ fandom is incredibly filled with people who abuse wording power. And the C++ enemies (such as that guy in the mailing list) are no weaker with respect to this. Language wars are particularly funny (if they would not be rather
sad) because people engage in them with such a passionate and zealous spirit that it
really sounds like a religious argument. C++ battles are particularly epic.
>>117
I'm not special in any way, and I don't disregard the Blub sentiment. I just don't think it holds as an argument for inducing (or rather
pushing) mentality changes, for the reasons I've written before. Ultimately, I think that applying the Blub argument is just a too easy way to win any debate, because it sounds like religion. Compare: "Of course you disagree with me, after all you have never been exposed to the X thinking paradigm and thus you're unable to think otherwise" with "Of course you disagree with me, after all you're not Christian and thus Satan's influence is on you." (This is just an example, please don't take it personally or even religiously :)
Once in a while one will have the Blub feeling. However, as I told you before, people will rather develop a degree of creativity in response to it, instead of being permanently locked inside a mental cage as Graham's argument will suggest. I'm absolutely sure even you have done it, too, specially if you're a self-taught programmer: haven't you ever "invented" things during your initial programming experiences? I'm sure you did, everyone else I know did that. Sure, there is a limit up to which this phenomena will go: seldom will a person reinvent lambda-calculus or abstract logic-programming through C syntax, but one is nevertheless well aware and well open to consume and understand these new ideas in the moment one's exposed to them.
The whole problem regarding the wordplay in your macro example could not be more true. Language is tricky in the sense that it is not guaranteed that one word or expression ("macro" in your example) will correlate to the same concept people are expecting them to. This is a very dangerous degree of communication noise, and the most important problem, in my sole opinion. I often think that many of the world's problems themselves are caused simply because people misunderstand each other -- and they do it often at the very basic language level. As it is expected, people concerned with this kind of problem will appeal to a more verbose and more carefully explained way of expressing themselves, in order to attempt to diminish this misunderstanding noise.
C "macros" and Lisp "macros" are not the same thing -- unfortunately, the same word suggest they are alike.
>>121
Yes, I agree with you. It is very easy,
very easy indeed to write a problematic OO design. And C++ is no different from that, unfortunately. Just look: people in C++ can't even decide what damn
source file extension to use in their projects:
.cpp, .cxx, .c++, .cc, .C... how come they could ever agree on other, deeper aspects of their designs?
Are these language problems? Do people need barriers to help them decide (or rather
impede them to choose) between possibilities -- including that one?
I'm well aware of the so-called "paradox of choice". It is very likely that C++ suffers from the "too many choices" disease indeed.
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Also, thank you people for replying to my posts. I've been enjoying the discussion. I hope I have contributed to something.