On Friday, February 23, 2018 09:48:33 Norm via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > [snip] > On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 04:06:23 UTC, psychoticRabbit > > wrote: > > Third, making D more and more like a quick scripting/hacking > > language (by removing or hiding so called 'noise', is not a > > good idea in my opinion. That too seemed to be a motivator for > > at some aspect of the change. > > This import feature and surrounding discussion I couldn't care > less about but I have to chime in and disagree with this > particular point. Ability to quickly script in D was a big > selling point for D at my workplace, I'd say *the* feature that > got uninterested developers listening and trying the language. > Being able to replace their Python scripts with a fast native > language that is also used for application and drivers > development was a winning formula.
I don't know that scripts are really all that big a deal, since being able to slap #/usr/bin/env rdmd at the top really just saves you from having to compile the binary yourself, but I do use that functionality from time to time, and regardless of whether that functionality is supported, being able to write small programs to do stuff is invaluable. I do frequently use shell scripts when stuff is simple, but it doesn't take much before it's just easier to write them in D, and on Windows, I sure don't want to be writing batch scripts. So, being able to reasonably write small D programs to perform simple tasks is huge. And regardless of the scripting support, D itself makes that _way_ nicer than C/C++ does. Writing programs that are hundreds of thousands or millions of lines long is definitely not D's only use case. - Jonathan M Davis