Re: Inheritance versus Generics

[tmoran@bix.com]

>I can read a language definition (carefully), and feel some confidence
>in criticizing it, despite the fact that I haven't invested several
>years of my life programming in it.  Otherwise, how can we make progress
>in language design?  There are thousands of languages out there -- the
>best we can expect from language designers is to be familiar with them
>by reading -- not direct experience.  Of course, there are those who
  There is a third alternative:  look at the results of thousands of
real programmers using the language.  It may be impractical for language
designers to have lots of direct experience in lots of languages, but
the history of science since the Greeks suggests there are real limits
on how far you can get by merely writing about other's ideas, without
going into the real world and trying out your ideas to see how they work
in practice.
  Take a look at "Strategic Directions in Programming Languages" in the
new ACM Computing Surveys.  Under "Exceptions", it says "introduced in
PL/1 but extensively studied and formalized in ML; similar concepts
appeared later in C++."  Did the "extensive study and formalization" in
ML include having thousands of real programmers, of varying excellence,
write millions of lines of code using exceptions in various
idiosyncratic ways, thus providing grist for the language designers to
fine tune the syntax, semantics, and guidelines about exceptions?