Am 28.04.2012 22:59, schrieb q66:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:35:40 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:09:50 UTC, q66 wrote:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:05:30 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
There are minimalistic languages that don't add too much complexity,
instead it results in code being kept simple.
I appreciate minimalistic languages. I love the simplicity of Scheme
and the design of Lua. Lua and Python are extensible language, but
truth be told, they cannot handle large scale programming. In fact, I
don't know of any minimalistic language that can scale from hundreds
of thousands to millions of lines of code. When you reach these sizes,
their simple design becomes a drawback. You start missing lots of
features. When you reach large scale programming, you want really
powerful tools.
That's basically what the Java designers discovered after experience.
The original language was simple and easy, but that simplicity
translated into way too much boilerplate code. So they kept adding
features from version to version, generics, then annotations, a means
to create new keywords. And now they would like to add delegates.
These are all needed in large programs.
D needs to do something it does really well and concentrate on that.
Otherwise the language will remain being rather vague and doing "a
bit of everything, but nothing truly well".
It does a lot of things well already. Our point of comparison should
not be Python or Lua, it must be C, C++, C#, Haskell, Ocaml, i.e
languages that are designed to develop large systems.
But most of all it needs to stabilize and polish, not change all the
time. I think its feature set is very good already.
We are far from having explored all its possibilities.
Instead of adding more and more features into a rigid language, it
needs to be made more flexible and extensible, both syntactically and
semantically.
This kind of attitude "we need big fat bullshit like Java and heavy use
of OO and idioms and EH and all that other crap" is broken and false.
And you have no way to prove that Python for example wouldn't scale for
large projects; its main fault is that the default implementation is
rather slow, but it's not pretty much missing anything required for a
large project.
Python is my favorite scripting language, but I would never propose a
dynamic language for programming on the large.
My employer does consulting for big projects. The type of entreprise
projects that require multi-site development scattered across the globe,
sometimes with 300+ developers.
There is no way a dynamic language would work in such scenarios, without
having a constant broken build on the CI system.
--
Paulo
