On 07.01.2016 12:36, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:
Understand. But IMO the main objective should be to demonstrate expressiveness and productivity to newcomers, and therefore it is crucial that the examples are understandable in its entirety by every newbie. Someone unfamiliar to D's UFCS and template instantiation syntax are likely unable to parse these examples in their heads without explanatory comments. Without the comments this example reduces to an incomprehensible blob of code without structure (in the eyes of a first-time visitor, who may not have a degree in CS) and is likely to repel instead of attract.
I don't agree that examples need to be fully understandable to newbies. We'd have to explain every single line. Rather, I think the examples should answer the question "How familiar or outlandish will D be for me?"
That said, I'm not against comments, and I may have gone overboard when cutting that example down. But I still think it's too long with all comments intact.
This looks pretty frightening if the objective is just to round floating point numbers (as explained by the only remaining comment) -- of course we know that this does a lot more, but a newbie doesn't.
Maybe the example should focus on command line arguments instead of stdin. No "replace anything that looks like a number", which is hard to match properly anyway, but instead just assume numbers in args. No regex necessary, just a `.map!(arg => arg.to!real.round.to!string)`.
Unfortunately, it looks like the handling of command line args is broken on dpaste: https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15050
A competition for writing the most concise code does not necessarily produce the most illustrative introductions into a language.
It's not a competition to write the shortest, but a competition to come up with something that's short enough. While being short it should actually be properly formatted, idiomatic D code.
