I've been reading through the thread and it seems that the D
community has an image problem of some sort. But why? D is great!
Were I to articulate D's key strengths I would say that it allows
you to write precise code and be sure that it is correct. This is
something you can neither do in the mainstream functional
languages (fanatical insistence on hammering the GC as much as
possible basically means you can never put any memory where you
actually want it), or in low level but unsafe C/C++ where
Everything Is Broke All The Time (TM). Don't even get me started
on Python or Java which seem like they are trying to force the
programmer to avoid both correctness and performance at all
costs. D comes with many features for helping enforce algorithmic
correctness as well as powerful code generation facilities to
write code where you have low level guarantees on what it will do.
But you already knew that. So here comes The Big Question: Do
those in the D community actually want it to be as mainstream as
Java or Python? There are benefits and (in my view) big
drawbacks. Right now the community is hobbyist, which means that
the users and developers work on it *because they actually care*.
And so far I have been impressed with the quality of the D
ecosystem overall.
Well, who is the audience for D? The armies of corporate database
programmers? Web developers? Kernel developers? Etc. Food for
thought.
On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 05:29:00 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 04:32:25 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
That we have a large number of string literals, in the core
of the language,
many of which could probably be language construct.
I haven't looked into it - anything in particular you have in
mind?
Not one precisely, but I'm sure we don't need as many as we
have. ", `, q", q{, r", x". I've never used several of theses
and I'm sure most people here would say the same.
I'd also prefer to get rid of /+ +/ comments, I thought they'd
be more useful than they are.
I use them all the time, and cringe whenever I code in
something else because i don't have them. Once you have /*
comments */ in some piece of code, you can't comment blocks
without going through hoops. that is very annoying./+ comments
+/ are one of the simple thing that makes coding in D much more
pleasant.
