Thank you very much, H. S. Teoh
That was an excellent post, very helpful and constructive. Thank
you!
I'm, btw. not opposed to templates and I see perfectly well that
a compiler is in a better position to handle them than an editor.
I also agree that sometimes I will gladly use templates rather
than real generics.
My main point wasn't anti-D (although I still don't like to
advertise generics when actually delivering templates and
mechanisms to implement generics oneself) but a completely
different one:
Sometimes I just want (or feel needing) to go fully OO and, at
the same time, have the compiler take care of the nitty gritties.
This, in fact, is a rather humble position; I have learned in
many years that, no matter how smart we are, we introduce bugs
and problems into our code because we are humans. I've learned
the hard way that there are things computers simply do better and
more diligently than we humans.
And there is another point.
Nowadays, we happily use gigantesque GUI systems, we gladly put 3
config parameters into an XML file and we happily consider 600k
lines sorce code adequate for, say, an audio player based on some
insane gobject system ...
On the other hand we do have serious qualms to increase program
size by, say, 5% in an application that typically runs on a 4
core processor with 8GB RAM. This strikes me as ... uh ...
strange.
And we *do get* something, possibly something vital, for those 5%
code size increase, namely code that is easier to understand and
to maintain, easier to extend and less buggy.
I'm not sure that Prof. Meyers no compromises attitude is always
good. After all, life is a series of trade offs and compromises.
I am, however, pretty sure that template systems tend to be messy
and complicated - and therefore bound to be error prone.
25 years ago I would have defended any weirdness; the harder and
stranger the better. Meanwhile I have learned that readability
often is considerably more important than ease of writing and
that some compromises seem cheap but turn out to be very
expensive later on.
Last but not least, there are hundred (thousands?) of more or
less compromise type languages out there. That wasn't what I was
looking for.
Thanks to your friendly, patient and constructive answer I'm
feeling that while D isn't perfect it's quite close to it and,
more importantly, it at least offers guys like me what I
consider important, if at a price. So what.
So, again: Thank you very much - Ramon
