Yes, that's how I understand the challenge. And I agree, it is subjective[1].
I think that the most positive way of looking at it is to declare that session storage in a web app and parsing csv files are understood problems which we don't want to get bogged down solving again. Last week I was writing a small web app to browse a 2GB or so data set, which was provided to me variously in xml and csv data files in a zip file.
If I could have called:
import data_20091201.zip
and gotten something useful, I would be all the happier.
I can now make that call, but in terms of getting stuff done, I'm judging my programming environment on the availability unzip utilities, xml and csv parsing libraries and database tools. As far as the language itself is concerned, I want to be able to structure my code neatly without worrying about forgotten temp files if the import fails.
I see the arc challenge as a proxy for making this sort of judgment, but it does come down to: "Do the people who maintain the language and contribute to its libraries worry about solving the sorts of problems that I would like to solve? And are they successful in making my life easier?"
[1] Subjective in the sense that the problem to solve is one that you may or may not care about solving, or may prefer to solve in a way that happens to use more code to make different aspects more explicit.
Comments
Yes, that's how I understand the challenge. And I agree, it is subjective[1].
I think that the most positive way of looking at it is to declare that session storage in a web app and parsing csv files are understood problems which we don't want to get bogged down solving again. Last week I was writing a small web app to browse a 2GB or so data set, which was provided to me variously in xml and csv data files in a zip file.
If I could have called:
and gotten something useful, I would be all the happier.I can now make that call, but in terms of getting stuff done, I'm judging my programming environment on the availability unzip utilities, xml and csv parsing libraries and database tools. As far as the language itself is concerned, I want to be able to structure my code neatly without worrying about forgotten temp files if the import fails.
I see the arc challenge as a proxy for making this sort of judgment, but it does come down to: "Do the people who maintain the language and contribute to its libraries worry about solving the sorts of problems that I would like to solve? And are they successful in making my life easier?"
[1] Subjective in the sense that the problem to solve is one that you may or may not care about solving, or may prefer to solve in a way that happens to use more code to make different aspects more explicit.