Anybody that is prepared to use someone else's name in the tile of an article slinging mud at that person should at a minimum pass a reading comprehension test before hitting the 'submit' button.
Thankfully Steve Yegge is popular, and there are enough mentions of him online in a positive light. If such an article mentioning someone's full name in the Title and URL was published about someone less famous - regardless of how baseless the content is - it might be slightly damaging.
If you didn't know who Steve Yegge was, and found this article, would you go explore the back-story to make your own judgement, or just assume that he's an idiot, as claimed by the article?
I haven't read the case against "private" and "public", but I also think that it is good to support private/public qualifiers.
That said, it is unfortunate that the blogger tries to get his point across through a title that gratuitously insults Steve. It is even more sad that these titles turn out to be the best way to capture people's attention. I'm assuming that the post would have gotten a fraction of the page views (and upvotes) if it had used a more reasonable title.
Well, the point is that Steve didn't actually say anything against "private" and "public", he posted a satire article poking fun at certain things. This guy obviously didn't get the joke and is calling Steve names over it.
“… it’s just that in C++ and the like, you don’t trust anybody, and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. the practical result is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.”
Erik Naggum[1], apparently in his "Capital letters are for conformists" phase.
Apart from the satire aspect, I think the strictness of enforced contracts is a difference in mindset between Eiffel/C++/Java people and those coming from Lisp and other dynamic languages.
Its great to see Steve back again. The author of this article is either a) just trying to be funny but is not good at it or b) was declared protected internal static anal at birth.
If they ever do add anal as an actual keyword is Java then I will start using it.
Seriously though, I always thought Python's approach to encapsulation was a bit weak (my background = Delphi and C#) but after reading all this it's more like having your cake and eating it too.
"Who’s fault is it? Person B can claim that since their code worked with the older version of X, it’s person A’s fault. But person A can claim that module Y should never have depended upon that particular behavior in the first place."
So apparently the point of having the private keyword is so you can point the finger at your coworker and say, "You should have made that private!"
Wait... who's the idiot? And it appears like they are playing it off in the comments like they knew this was a joke? Last time I heard "fetid dingo kidneys" it wasn't a haha sort of thing.
