On 12/10/2010 10:26 PM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
http://vimeo.com/17420638
A very interesting talk.
I used to like D. To write code in a high level while at the same
time being very close to the machine, with class invariants, unit
tests and many other features seemed very appealing. But I always
felt there was something wrong.
About a year ago I met Ruby. Now I find languages like Java, C#,
Python and D kind of ugly and uncomfortable. Why? Exactly because of
what it is said in that video.
This is not to start a flame war or trolling, it's just to show you
why I changed my mind so much about D, and why I think (IMHO) you
should care about naming conventions (like bearophile says), more
powerful unittests (and not having unittests integrated into the
language but rather being able to build your own test frameworks
with ease) and stop caring about being C-syntax friendly. The world
doesn't need that many semicolons and parenthesis. :-)
I guess what I liked about it (and Ruby) is that I see everything is
very consistent and nice to my eyes. I never squeeze my brian to
understand a piece of code, nor I had to deal with __some__strange
variable names, or even __keywords.
Code is read many more times than it is written and so it is of huge
important that code is as readable as possible. Of course this is a
subjective matter, but I don't understand why some people think __traits
or __gshared are ok. So what if those are compiler extensions or
whatever? I don't want to stop thinking about those details of a
programming language when I'm dealing with another problem. When I read
Ruby code I feel like I'm reading an English textbook (better, a poem
:-P), while why I read other languages I feel I'm reading... well, a
programming language. And my head is so much better at reading text than
reading machine code.
Then, other things in D like properties for which you do ++ don't work
or such corner cases doesn't happen in Ruby. It's consistent. Once Ruby
defines something, it does it well, not just half through it.
But yes, I agree with everyone here, the rest of the talk is not very
serious...
