On 9/5/2011 7:48 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I agree with all of the above. However, as is often the case, there's more than
one side to the story.
Bad APIs have their costs too. We can't afford to have an XML library that
offers few and badly packaged features and comes at the tail of all benchmarks.
We also can't afford a JSON library that is poorly designed and badly written.
Ironically, the costs mostly manifest the same way: people will decide not to
use D because it "lacks good libraries" and "is quirky to use". In many ways a
language's standard library is a showcase of the language, and to a newcomer an
inconsistent and awkward standard library affects the perception of the
language's quality.
I agree that the XML and JSON libraries need to be scrapped and rewritten. But
simply changing the names of otherwise successful APIs is not worth while.
c) possibly create programs a la gofix that help migration.
gofix cannot fix books, articles, blogs, and presentations.
Furthermore, in order to work successfully, gofix needs to be a complete D front
end, capable of handling both the old and the new stuff. Doing a perl script
would be a disaster. It's a substantial project, has a high risk of inadequacy,
and I suspect our resources are better spent elsewhere.
Considering also the problems people have running dmd and getting it to find
their imports and libraries, add in having to run 'gofix' over their source code
first, then patch up what gofix goofed up, seems a stretch.
