On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 11:32:42 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 12:07:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
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.
[snip]
Be that as it may, however, you forget the fact that people
"with good taste" who have (had) an intrinsic motivation to
learn D are also very critical people who take no bs, else they
wouldn't have ended up using D in the first place. Since
they've already learned a lot of concepts etc. with D over the
years,
it's technically easy for them to move on to either an easier
language or one that offers more or less the same features as D.
I don't think so. If we are talking about the set of technically
very capable people with an aesthetic sense then I don't think
easier or feature set in a less beautiful way is appealing.
This is based on revealed preference, because the conversations I
have with technically very capable people that know many other
languages as well or better than D go like "what compensation are
you expecting? X. But if it's to write D, I can be flexible"
and so on.
Template meta-programming in D is quite simple. C++ has many of
the features that D has. Therefore it's easy to do template
meta-programming in C++, and just as easy for others to read your
code in C++ as D? I don't think so. Having learnt the concepts
in D and that it can be beautiful and easy kind of ruins you for
inferior approaches.
BTW I was grumbling about some C# wrapper code written manually.
It talks to a C style API (connected to an internal C++ code base
developed before I became involved). So you have a low level C#
side declaration of the C function that returns an exception
string by argument. Then you have a C# declaration of a wrapper
function that throws an exception if the exception string is not
empty. Then you have a layer on top that puts the class back
together. Then you have a high level wrapper layer. Then you
have the bit that talks to Excel.
I thought surely there must be decent code generation
possibilities in C#. It's not too bad as a language. I looked
it up. Microsoft say use HTML templates. Well, okay... but I'm
not sure I like the trade-off of having to do stuff like that
versus having to deal with some pain at the command-line now and
then.
So once they're no longer happy with the way things are, they
can dive into a any language fast enough for the cost of
transition to be low.
You're making an implicit empirical statement that I don't
believe to be accurate based on my experience. I would say if a
representative programmer from the D community decides the costs
no longer offset the benefits then sure they can learn another
language because the representative programmer here is pretty
talented. But so what?
