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You cannot expect to get the Turing award for just creating a language that uses stuff already known and just changes the syntactic sugar.[1] To be explicit though, this comment is spot on. As someone who was part of the original Java development group when it was called "First Person Inc", I found the language "equivalence" concept debates the most interesting. For example, is Boolean a first class type? Or is it just a one bit integer? Is integer always signed? If you have 1 bit integers, 8 bit integers, 16, 32, and 64 bit integers, why not make 1024 bit integers a type too? Why is the number of bits fixed? If you want to be super radical, is it bits in an integer or is it digits? Is the integer type (radix, digits)? At one time there were discussions about real (signed), integer (unsigned), frac (fractional) and float (split). And then a product manager type walks in and says something like "Love the architectural purity y'all are going for here but nobody else uses all these things so let's not make something that is so complicated we'll never ship it." The author does a good job of exploring the characteristics of "good" enums, and I think it would be even better if it was understood that if your language is going to be used to implement finite state machines (which most programming languages do) then having strong protections against injecting invalid states into those machines is essential. If the language provides a way, that is great, otherwise you end up like the author did generating 30 - 50 lines of code for something that should take 3 - 5 lines to express. [1] This is an inside joke, IYKYK |