On Tuesday, 30 August 2016 at 18:36:19 UTC, CRAIG DILLABAUGH
wrote:
I am going to vote with Adam here. If memory serves me
correctly what initially drew me in to the D language was a
statement on the main page that "D is not a religion". I think
at the time I had been doing some work with Java, where
everything had to be an object. Man, I hate Java for that.
Many of the inconsitencies and problems in Java come from basic
types not being objects. Everything being objects is a great way
to keep things easy to understand, consistent and clean. It has
some impact on performance, but a lot can be done here which is
more than sufficient for application programming. Hot Spot
runtime code optimization in Java is very effective.
Also, I think saying if you don't like functional programming
you will miss 'most' of what D has to offer is really selling
the language short. After all you can write C or C++ style
code in D if you want, which may be very attractive to some
folks.
D has a lot to offer with regard to functional programming. It
has pure functions and true immutable classes (true = also sub
objects become immutable), which Scala all doesn't have (because
of restrictions of the JVM). Does D have tail call recursion
optimization? I don't know, actually. If D had that and pattern
matching, it would beat Scala with all it's hype by a big leap.
