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3 points by ryszard_szopa 5902 days ago | link | parent

Driving a Ferrari is rarely a collaborative endeavor :-)

Keeping `_' safe in fact increases the programmer's freedom. If I knew that by doing something I was going to fk up w/ other people's code and how they expect their code to behave, I would rather not* do it. OTOH, if there are namespaces, etc. then I know that I can enforce whatever coding conventions I want, in the privacy of my personal sandbox.

Programming is not only about communicating w/ computers; it is also about communicating w/ other people, i.e. your coworkers and so on. Nothing that makes it harder can be a Good Thing. (Of course, unless you are the Lone Wolf coding in your cave---but then you are probably using your Own Better Language and don't care about Arc anyway ;-).)



5 points by bgutierrez 5902 days ago | link

I think [... _ ...] is fine. If I want a language to protect me from myself or others, I'll use Java. :-)

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1 point by leimy 5900 days ago | link

Freedom is an interesting philosophical topic. How can a restriction make you more free? Well if you drink the FSF GPL Richard Stallman branded Kool Aid, you might "get it", but I sure don't.

I don't want the freedom from doing things, I want to the freedom to do things.

That said, strictness and protection and safety of some language features is something some people would like to rely on.

I think operator overloading in C++ was a huge freaking mistake for instance. You can look at two piece of code without going through some contextual learning to find out what the hell "+" was just redefined to do, and I think that's crappy.

Other languages get by some how without operator overloading. And often without a loss of expressiveness.

That said, judicious use, and education about how subsystems in software work is a necessity even in the presence and absence of things people might consider to be abominations, like operator overloading :-)

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