[HelloNurse]

A hash table that compares hashes instead of keys, doesn't support deletion, doesn't distribute keys evenly etc. is not even wrong; criticizing it is definitely not "crap for daring to exist", especially in the polite tone of the linked article.

If Hare is intended to be a deliberately Spartan C replacement, so be it; but pretending that writing a hash table is easy looks like the immature and arrogant opinion of someone completely unaware of his ignorance.

[darthcoder1010]

> A hash table that compares hashes instead of keys, doesn't support deletion, doesn't distribute keys evenly etc.

I agree, that implementation is definitely flawed. Probably the author do not consider that important a proper hashtable.

> looks like the immature and arrogant opinion of someone completely unaware of his ignorance.

This is what I'm referring to when I say "harsh" criticism. Maybe he is wrong, but I think there are better ways of saying it: "Hey, maybe a proper hashtable is not that easy.. have you consider [insert here improvement proposal]?"

[HelloNurse]

Everybody can have a bad day and write terrible code, but blogging about it as a positive example and as evidence that a practically useful programming language doesn't need high quality generic data structures suggests a deeper problem at understanding the needs of programming language users.

Wrong questions (focusing on the narrow case of unique, overspecialized application-specific data structures), not only forgivable wrong answers (that hashtable from the Hare compiler, after all, could be close to good enough for its specific usage).

Personally, I think abstract data types based on some kind of macros or templates would be a valuable feature for Hare, even if their use in the standard library is limited, because someone will want to write reusable libraries.

Even within the confines of an application, there is a practical need to deal with different uses of a data structure in the same way and make changes in one place (e.g. "the generic hashtable in our ORM" ) rather than in possibly numerous quasi-duplicates (e.g. 250 different struct to struct hashtables representing database query results in a large business application).

C++ templates, a good example of what could be realistically offered by Hare, allow to upgrade a definition from "do X with one type" to "do X with any suitable type", which is a useful abstraction even without reuse (what's actually expected or not of the type parameters becomes explicit), a technique to write general libraries "for free" (e.g. you can put whatever you want in our hashtable), a technique to define general language foundations (e.g. you can have smart pointers to anything).