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by klibertp 11 days ago
Sure. But you know, from personal experience, you can be a happy BASIC user writing simple games without knowing about the existence of arrays. It's a bit hard, but nothing copy & paste couldn't defeat. And while learning about `DIM` was quite a breakthrough for my 8 y.o. self, I'm not sure I'd welcome an article about it on HN's front page.

The same is true for iterator protocols: as noted in my other comment, they have existed since 1975 in almost the same form (with a few closely related variants). It's not easy to find a mainstream language that doesn't support them "since forever" (in "tech years"). They're just not news, no matter how you slice it.

1 comments

Still, the average programmer lives happily without ever looking what’s under the syntax of their language. While I agree the mode here on HN is not the average programmer, there are always newcomers and larvae who need our support to develop fully into adult developers.