On Monday, 8 August 2022 at 00:11:33 UTC, pascal111 wrote:
I don't have specific code but it was a general notice. Take Python as in example, the same program in Python doesn't cost much code as D code, and of course by putting in accounts that that I assume that there are some special tasks D can do, while Python can't do.
There is definitely a spectrum of programming language practical expressiveness (the opposite of verbosity), with the dynamic languages (python, perl, ruby) on the "most expressive" end, and static languages (C, C++, Java) on the "most verbose" end.
D is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, much more expressive than C but not as expressive as python.
The trade-off is much better run-time performance and lower memory overhead compared to the dynamic languages.
I've been writing C, Perl and Python for a living for a while, following the common practice of writing a solution in Perl or Python first, for shortest possible development time, and then rewriting performance-intensive bits in C when more performance is needed.
The appeal of D, to me, is that it gives me something akin to the same approach with just one language. I can write very concise, expressive D when performance doesn't matter, and then write more verbose C-like D when I need C-like performance, all in the same source file, with the same language.
Having a sane and useful threading model is an added bonus. Neither python nor perl nor nodejs have useful threads, whereas D gives us real, concurrent threads with a fraction of the boilerplate -- https://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/multithreading/synchronization-sharing
On the other hand, I've noticed that D's idiomatic brevity can be diluted by the extremely verbose function names used in the standard library. Sure, foreach loops can be just as concise as python's -- foreach(i; arr) -- but then you end up getting carpal tunnel syndrome anyway from typing out "AllImplicitConversionTargets" or "filterBidirectional" or "levenshteinDistanceAndPath".
My impression is that brevity is more important to the language developers than it is to the phobos developers.
