And the answer rsc gave was charmingly funny and helpful. Did you try following rsc's advice? I won't post a spoiler here; It's awesome and way better than "hey, we use ^ instead of ~ for that".
The problem so often is that people who can't keep up and don't understand how good the answers are, blame the experts for going too fast, and mistake "being too busy to handhold 1000s of people" for "being a jerk".
Would you go to Yankee Stadium and stop Derek Jeter on the way into work, just to ask him "Hey, does Major League Baseball use metal bats, or wooden bats?"
I felt that his response was a gentle nudge to say "we expect you, as a programmer, to either read the spec or just write a test program, to get your answer." When I started out with IRC and Usenet I had to be inducted into the culture of doing due diligence and asking questions correctly, and I am better for it. I do feel that a lot of people do not respect that culture because they feel that there should be as few obstacles to new participants as possible, including very mild hurt feelings.
We would have to agree to disagree here. Being passive aggressive towards newbies is not really a sign of a welcoming community. How dare they ask an obvious question... I know it's pretty standard in many online communities, but it's the opposite of what Russ says they are trying to accomplish in the Go community.
A really helpful answer in this case would include the story behind why the Go creators decided to use a different operator. Linking to the entire spec (not just the relevant section on arithmetic operators) is not friendly, patient or welcoming.
Rob Pike is pretty busy too, but he appears to be much friendlier in his responses (even to newbie questions).
"RTFM" is not the suggestion proffered there. The link to the Go spec was an aside.
I'll probe once more, since you totally ignored the question: did you run that test program through the compiler? The result is evidence of magnitudes more friendliness than anything that anyone could possibly write in a comment.
The test app will print this error: "the bitwise complement operator is ^" Calling having to build/run an app to see that simple and short answer is not "evidence of magnitudes more friendliness than anything that anyone could possibly write in a comment". It's really the opposite. If the answer is that simple why not just write it there and then add a clarification saying: "by the way, the compiler will also help you with this because we know how hard it is to get rid of the old C habits"
Imagine asking somebody if the sky is blue and then instead of getting a simple "Yes" answer you get a piece of source code you need to compile and run to see that "Yes".
rsc wrote a lot of the Ms.
And the answer rsc gave was charmingly funny and helpful. Did you try following rsc's advice? I won't post a spoiler here; It's awesome and way better than "hey, we use ^ instead of ~ for that".
The problem so often is that people who can't keep up and don't understand how good the answers are, blame the experts for going too fast, and mistake "being too busy to handhold 1000s of people" for "being a jerk".
Would you go to Yankee Stadium and stop Derek Jeter on the way into work, just to ask him "Hey, does Major League Baseball use metal bats, or wooden bats?"