bearophile wrote:
Templates are far more than just generics.
But an army of people argue that using templates for more than generics is
bad.
Not surprising considering how awful templates are in C++. Don't make the
mistake of transferring that to D, which does things significantly differently.
In C++ you use templates for generic data structures and classes, for
metaprogramming, for type-level computing, and probably for other things. For
metaprogramming even D doesn't use templates much any more (after the
introduction of CTFE), most other ways to perform metaprogramming are better
than doing it with C++ templates. Type level computing is better done with
staged compilation, a type to represent a type, more flexible type sytems,
etc. See modern functional languages.
Nobody here is arguing that C++ nailed it with templates.
That happens at compile time. That happens at run time. D's happens at
compile time.
Python has a wonderful advantage over D: there is no compilation! You write
your code and you run it!
The compilation being hidden from you doesn't mean it isn't happening.
So no need to let things happen at compile-time. If
you want to pre-compute things you can just split your program in two levels
and run a level before another, or use eval/exec. So Python is better here.
No compilation, no problems :-) Generative programming in Python is way
better than D :-)
There is no "pre-computing" things in python. It's all redone from scratch every
time you run a python program.
Generally I don't post a message in a sub-thread like this. In the end what's
the purpose of this sub thread? Is Python better than D? Who cares?
You started off this thread claiming that D had almost no advantages over
Python.
