On 11/27/11 10:32 AM, so wrote:
Whenever i see articles like
http://cpp-next.com/archive/2011/11/having-it-all-pythy-syntax/ i keep
wondering why they are so silent in this newsgroup,
I am sure they keep an eye on D. I would expect some kind of
contribution (as in suggestions, proposes...).
They are the top C++ developers, pushing language's capabilities. So, if
someone is annoyed by the limits of C++, that would be them.
Forget everything, i was thinking that the generic capabilities of D
alone is enough to attract all the boost crowd.
Phew, had to get it out.
The dynamics and psychology at play are, IMHO, a fair amount more
complex. I'm saying this as one who has lived such.
Mastering a difficult language (and probably skill in general) is to
some extent like acquiring some power or money - it puts the subject in
a conservative position where she'd try to expand the use of the
language for tasks not playing into the language's strength, as opposed
to achieving the tasks by escaping the language. That explains e.g. why
people are willing to use C++'s preprocessor for tasks that would be
trivial for m4 or even bash, or that people try all sorts of
systems-level coding in languages not adequate for that.
I've had a sort of awakening during my first year in grad school. A
professor was teaching constraint logic programming (CLP) and I noted to
him that many CLP constructs could be expressed in C++ templates quite
nicely. (That prediction was correct, see
http://www.mpprogramming.com/cpp.) He (knowing my past) suggested kindly
that I'd do good to think more broadly instead of trying to emulate
everything I come across in C++. And right he was.
Many C++ programmers have heard about D, but it would be naive to think
they'd just stop looking solutions to problems in C++, just because
those problems have a good solution in D.
Andrei
