On 2011-09-21 22:20, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 9/21/11 2:29 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 09/21/2011 06:55 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I'm back from the Strange Loop conference. It's been an interesting
experience. The audience was very diverse, with interest in everything
functional (you'd only need to say "Haskell" or "monad" to get positive
aahs), Web/cloud/tablet stuff, concurrent and distributed systems.
Mentioning C++ non-mockingly was all but a faux pas; languages like
Scala, Haskell, Clojure, and Erlang got attention. The quality of talks
has been very variable, and unfortunately the
over-confident-but-clueless-speaker stereotype was well represented.
I gave a talk there
(https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/generic-programming-galore-using-d)
which has enjoyed moderate audience and success. I uploaded the slides
at http://erdani.com/d/generic-programming-galore.pdf and the video may
be available soon.
I am looking forward to it!
There was a very strong interest in D's CTFE abilities, which we should
consider a strategic direction going forward.
One milestone would be to make DMD GC enabled. CTFE string manipulation
sucks up too much memory.
Also finalizing D's
concurrency language and library infrastructure is essential. These two
features are key differentiators. Also, capitalizing on D's functional
features (which are e.g. better than Scala's but less known) would add
good value.
Where D still loses when compared to Scala is functional code syntax:
val newcol = collection filter {x=>x<5} map {x=>2*x}
Yoda this wrote.
or maybe
val newcol = for(x<-collection if(x<5)) yield 2*x
Too baroque.
vs
auto newrange = filter!((x){return x<5;})(map!((x){return 2*x;})(range));
auto newrange = filter!"a<5"(map!"2*a"(range));
At first some people get the heebiejeebies when seeing string-based
lambda and the implicit naming convention for unary and binary
functions. More importantly, there's the disadvantage you can't access
local functions inside a string lambda. We should probably add a
specialized lambda syntax.
I like this syntax:
auto newRange = range.map(a => 2 * a).filter(a => a < 5);
--
/Jacob Carlborg
