On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 11:40:55 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
Hear, hear, is it so unlikely that one footstep should fall in
the footprint of another?
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.
This is it. Great languages (IMO) have condensed their features
down to the smallest set of orthogonal features that they could
manage. This makes the language easier to reason about, to
share code, to maintain code, to learn, to read code, even
writing it is often easier!
Right now I feel that D is growing in 'features' and corner
cases beyond the point where I want to explore it's depths.
It's gone from a swim in the bay into crossing the Channel. I
always think about Herb Sutters Guru of the Week column and how
it made me think "ugh - too many oddities to learn". I could be
wrong and I hope I am.
Aye. I think what I totally dislike about C++ is that I cannot
hold the whole language in my head. It is unthinkable that I
could just type in a C++ program using the full feature set and
compile it with no complaints from the compiler and quite a bit
of head-scratching to figure out why it won't take code that
looks sensible.
Corner cases is a major reason for increased cognitive load. Even
javascript gives me that feeling, caused by the odd weird
non-intuitive flaws that makes such a simple language not so
simple after all.
We'll see what happens when DMD is translated to D and
refactored. Maybe someone creates an experimental D3 from it to
see if it can be made a bit more orthogonal. I think that could
be an important move.
It's quite a nice twist that the thread discussing which
language is better branched into what version of English is the
right one - as if such a thing is meaningful.
As a norwegian I can't make up my mind as to whether I should
write "color" or "colour". I suspect it will be taken as some
kind of political statement. Hey, I am neutral! I use "color" in
source code and "colour" in writing. :)
