On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 12:33:49 UTC, rjframe wrote:
On Thu, 23 Aug 2018 15:35:45 +0000, Joakim wrote:
* Language complexity
Raise your hand if you know how a class with both opApply and
the
get/next/end functions behaves when you pass it to foreach.
How about a struct? Does it matter if it allows copying or
not?
The language was built because C++ was deemed too complex!
Please see the thread about lazy [1] for a case where a
question actually has an answer, but nobody seems to know it
(and the person who does know it is hard pressed to explain
the nuance that triggers this).
By this rationale, C++ should be dead by now. Why do you think
it's fatal to D?
It's worth noting that C++ isn't always chosen for its
technical merits. It's a well-known language whose more or less
standard status in certain domains means it's the default
choice; C++ is sometimes used for projects in which Stroustrup
would say it's obviously the wrong language for the job.
D is far more likely to require justification based on
technical merit. If D becomes another C++, why bother taking a
chance with D when you can just use C++, use a well-supported,
commonly-used compiler, and hire from a bigger pool of
jobseekers?
That's why the people that adopt D will inordinately be
principals not agents in the beginning. They will either be
residual claimants on earnings or will have acquired the
authority to make decisions without persuading a committee that
makes decisions on the grounds of social factors.
If D becomes another C++ ? C++ was ugly from the beginning (in
my personal subjective assessment) whereas D was designed by
people with good taste.
That's why it appeals inordinately to people with good taste.
In Hong Kong we had some difficulty hiring a support person for a
trading floor. Spoke in some cases to the most senior person in
HK for even large and well-known funds (small office in this
case) and they simply were not good enough. Thanks to someone
from the D community I met a headhunter who used to be at Yandex
but realized the money was better as a headhunter.
They don't have many financial clients I think, don't have
connections on the talent side in finance. But the runners up
were by far better than anyone we had found through other sources
and the best was outstanding.
Good job, I said. It's funny that the person we hired came from
a big bank when other headhunters are looking in the same place
and know that world better. By the way, how many people did you
interact with to find X ? In London if a headhunter puts 10
people before you and you are really pretty happy then that's a
good day. He said two hundred ! And they had to come up with a
hiring test too.
So the basic reason they could find good people in technology in
finance when others couldn't is that they have much better taste.
Do you see ? The others knew many more people, they had
experience doing it, and somebody who had to persuade a committee
would have found it hard to justify.
Programming ability follows a Pareto curve - see the best and the
rest. There might be many more C++, Python and C# programmers.
The incidence of outstanding ones is lower than in the D
community for the very reason that only someone obtuse or very
smart will learn D for career reasons - intrinsic motivation
draws the highest talent.
It depends if your model of people doing work is an army of
intelligent trained monkeys or a force made up of small elite
groups of the best people you have ever worked with. Of course
the general of the trained monkey army is going to be difficult
to persuade. And so ?
On the other hand, someone who is smart and has good taste and
has earned the right to decide - D is a less popular language
that has fewer tutorials and less shiny IDE and debugger support.
Well if you're a small company and you are directly or in effect
a proxy owner of the residual (ie an owner of some kind) it's a
pragmatic question and saying nobody got fired for buying IBM -
that's missing the point because the success is yours and the
failure is yours and you can't pass the buck.
The beauty of being the underdog is that it's easy to succeed.
You don't need to be the top dog, and in fact it's not
strategically wise to do something that might think you stand a
chance - let them think what they want. The underdog just needs
to keep improving and keep getting more adoption, which I don't
have much doubt is happening.
Modern people can be like children in their impatience sometimes!
I've only been programming since 1983 so I had the benefit of
high level languages like BBC BASIC, C, a Forth I wrote myself,
and Modula 3. And although I had to write a disassembler at
least I has assemblers built in. Programming using a hex keypad
is not that satisfying after a while. It takes a long time to
develop a language, its ecosystem and community.
An S curve is quite flat in the beginning. D is a very ambitious
language so of course in any one domain it seems like nobody is
using it, but this is deceptive. It isn't like Go where its more
used for a particular purpose.
Anyone that thinks they are a strong programmer by comparison
with others in their world and can keep up here and would like to
write D should contact me (if you can't see my email then Michael
Parker will have it). And if the same but they would like to
write C#, Python or Julia then that also applies.
Dicebot wrote in the old post that triggered this discussion
something that people interpreted as meaning he was leaving D.
Around the same time as his old post was discovered he released
his version of dtoh that he intends to be integrated into the
compiler. So he may or may not have changed his mind about
making upstream contributions but this is something pretty close
to that even if it's not the same.
It's not for me to say, but I believe he continues to work in D
professionally also.
It would be wonderful if we could get back to figuring out what
constructive steps we could take to make a better world. People
who make predictions should back their views with something -
they should have skin in the game. If someone wants to make a
prediction about D I am happy to take the other side of a wager
if I disagree strongly. I play for high stakes - usually cups of
coffee. I have a bet with my economist that there won't be
another referendum about whether to leave or soft Vs hard before
we leave the EU. I win two coffees if no referendum and lose one
if there is. Since it takes six months to prepare the question
and Brexit date is March, I think that's not bad for me.
