On Saturday, 21 November 2015 at 13:28:20 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Not proud, I've argued in this forum in the past that scripting
languages have an audience that D is unlikely to make much of
an inroads into. They simply optimize programmer convenience
over efficiency and that's an acceptable tradeoff in certain
niches. However, even in that market, there are badly-designed
languages that do unreasonably well.
Not interested in an argument here, so I'll end with a
constructive question: what do you believe D "should learn from
[PHP/JS] rather than dismissing it?"
Well the first lesson would be in your comment already. A badly
designed languages that get what matter to some user right will
do unreasonably well.
By extension I'd say that the ecosystem matter as much, if not
more than the language itself.
That getting something really right can excuse a lot of crap.
Think iPhone 1, the smartphone that don't do 3G nor send MMS.
Sounds like a joke doesn't it ? Yet thi is how the second biggest
mobile platform started with.
On a more meta level, when something succeed at a very large
scale, while having aspect of it that smell bad. Believe me I can
tell you a lot about how bad PHP is, as well as most people at
Facebook could. This language is fucked beyond repair in many
ways. But, that only makes it more interesting, because that
means there is something in there that is non obvious and that
most alternatives missed.
Rather than having an aristocratic attitude toward these
languages that we perceive as badly designed, we should be really
asking ourselves the question "what did they get right ? Can we
get it right too ?". Because we have signal here, that is telling
us this thing really matter.
