"To the extent that anyone cares about C++11's random-number facility at all, the C++ community is polarized between two views—one that likes it, and one that hates it."
Isn't that almost a tautology? "People who care about X either love it or hate it".
Yeah, and all those people probably aren't participating in online discussions about it. I'm pretty happy with most aspects of <random>, but I don't seek out arguments. I just use it.
No. You can recognize the importance of something and care about it a lot while thinking it's (eg) mediocre. Thinking a problem is important and having an extreme opinion of a solution are entirely different axes.
In my experience, having an extreme opinion of a problem's importance (very important, not important whatsoever) is correlated with having an extreme opinion of a solution (love it, hate it).
> having an extreme opinion of a problem's importance (very important, not important whatsoever) is correlated with having an extreme opinion of a solution (love it, hate it).
I don't think this is correct either. How would thinking a problem is "not important whatsoever" imply that someone must love or hate any potential solution? I couldn't care less how sports team X fixes their losing record, and yet your claim is that that would somehow correlate with me having extreme opinions (love or hate) about their decision to draft Player Y? Very much to the contrary, I'm apathetic about any solution, which is pretty much the definition of finding a problem "not important whatsoever".
Furthermore, I'm not even sure how "extreme opinions of the problem's importance" is relevant to what we're talking about. The original quote was "to the extent that anyone cares about [the problem] at all". That's anywhere from "I care a bit" to "I care a ton", not exclusively "I care a ton".
Finally, even if you weren't very wrong about the premise of what we're talking about: "X is correlated with Y" doesn't mean "X implies Y is a tautology (or close to one) because they're the same thing", which is the original statement I was responding to.
Isn't that almost a tautology? "People who care about X either love it or hate it".