Found D in the strangest of places... Right under the letter D
By some bizarre coincidence, or rightfully so, an (somewhat artificial attempt at a cleanroom-ish) unbiased attempt to find out what Google associates with each letter of the English alphabet, someone with extra time on their hands at BBC's technology department, I was pleasantly surprised to find, found D (language) to be the highest ranked single character Google search result for D, in good company, right next to the letter (and language) C. The article (link below) is titled "Google: An A to Z of search results" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44725867 All I can think was—"D is going places" PS: Apologies for the excessive parentheticals. In an attempt to convey my precise thoughts, I might have murdered English Grammar and rendered the post incomprehensible. Although being humans—as opposed to an (NLP) bot—you should be able to get the point one way or the other. -- Sameer
Re: Looking for the article comparing D to Ada and others
I had no idea of the DoD's Steelman requirements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelman_language_requirements) I found another documents that has the same table that was on the website listed in an earlier post. Here are the individual links: https://www.dwheeler.com/steelman/steeltab.htm http://jedbarber.id.au/steelman.html I thought it might be nice to combine those two tables in one below. D is really up there! |--++-++-+| | Language | No | Partial | Mostly | Yes | Mostly/Yes | |--++-++-+| | D| 7 | 15 | 25 | 66 |81% | | Parasail | 11 | 6 | 11 | 85 |85% | | Pascal | 19 | 16 | 11 | 67 |69% | | Rust | 12 | 19 | 23 | 59 |73% | |--++-++-+| | Ada | 3 | 5 | 11 | 94 |93% | | C| 32 | 21 | 16 | 44 |53% | | C++ | 19 | 17 | 23 | 54 |68% | | Java | 20 | 12 | 22 | 59 |72% | |--++-++-+| -- Sameer
Re: Whence came UFCS?
Wow! I am glad to see so many responses! Thanks for your indulgence. So, to summarize, the concept (no pun intended) has been around for a while in D---originally in the context of arrays. It just might have been a bug, or an unintended side-effect. I intend to read the archival posts and might have something to say later. -- Sameer PS: I realize that I am a stickler for history, or rather historical contexts related to technology or research that I am involved in, and more recently regarding programming language concepts. The culprit is probably the fact that I have been teaching programming languages course (or, taught one semester of it, and plan to teach it again in Spring) which has allowed me to learn of the origins of so many concepts which we sometimes take for granted today, but were part of some old languages. PS1: I didn't want to respond to a particular thread, but there is no way in this forum to write a generic response to multiple posts so I am picking one as the anchor.
Whence came UFCS?
During our Boston D Meetup today, we went through and deconstructed Walter's wonderfully elegant blog post from 2012 called "Component Programming in D" http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240008321&siteSectionName=architecture-and-design I stumbled upon this gem (and another score or so articles on the digital mars site) a few days back, while following various hyperlinks, within and around the blog on Walter's take on what was C's biggest mistake which has been getting a lot of comments over the past few days. This post which I have been trying to digest bit-by-bit over the past few days, made me realize why I fell in love with D in the first place. To top it all, Steven played a lightening talk from 2018, called "values as types" by Andreas (https://youtu.be/Odj_5_pDN-U?t=21m10s) which is a parody on C++ and is so utterly ludicrous, we could not stop laughing. Anyway, back to the point. During the same period, but independent of the thread on C's mistake, I found that Kotlin has something called "Extension Functions" and "Extension Properties" (https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/extensions.html) via. the following article on Medium https://medium.com/@magnus.chatt/why-you-should-totally-switch-to-kotlin-c7bbde9e10d5 Specifically Item #14. What I saw/read seemed eerily familiar. Almost like a "wolf in sheeps clothing". The example screamed of UFCS. Then, later, while reading the above Kotlin documentation, I saw a reference being made to similar functionality in C# and Gosu (apparently a programming language that I have never heard of before today) called Extensions. Furthermore, I found that Project Lombok (https://projectlombok.org/features/experimental/ExtensionMethod) has tried to make this idiom/functionality available in Java through a @ExtensionMethod annotation. This also almost exactly represent UFCS functionality, though much more cludgy, I must say. Therefore, after reading the word "Extension" in three different contexts, I started wondering and various questions came to mind, starting with---Whence came UFCS? a. Did Walter and/or Andrei invent it independently of C#? b. Was it called UFCS in some other language? c. Were they not aware of Extensions when they coined UFCS? d. Are UFCS and Extensions really one and the same thing? e. If not, what is/are the difference(s)? And is this why a different term/acronym was coined? As far as I can tell a Google search on UFCS leads to only material on D and a Wikipedia entry mentioning Stroustrup and Sutter's proposal from 2016 to extend C++ to have this facility. It is likely that the Wikipedia article is severely incomplete in its historical connections as there is no mention of C# or that of Walter's 2012 Dr. Dobbs post which already lists it towards the end---in the list of features that D has which allows the creation of elegant components---among other dozen or so features. In the end I thought I might as well dump my thoughts on the D forum and hear straight from the horse's (or horses') mouth(s)---so to speak. -- Sameer
Re: D on top of Hacker News!
On Sunday, 3 June 2018 at 20:12:03 UTC, JakubJ wrote: On Sunday, 3 June 2018 at 16:58:23 UTC, Sameer Pradhan wrote: It was nice to read Walter's article from 2014... Wonder who posted it, and how long it will stay in the visibility range, but it was a nice feeling to see it at the top. -- Sameer Hi Sameer, I just discovered it today and posted it afterwards. Then, looked into this forum and surprise ;) . :-) However, I don't plan on jumping into D right now because I'm starting to use Elixir/OTP seriously at GSoC and between that and the finals at uni there's little time left. In case you missed it, Walter did an AMA and answered some of the issues raised in the HN comments.
D on top of Hacker News!
It was nice to read Walter's article from 2014... Wonder who posted it, and how long it will stay in the visibility range, but it was a nice feeling to see it at the top. -- Sameer
Re: D as a college language
On Saturday, 5 May 2018 at 07:37:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 5/4/2018 4:35 AM, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote: Since D seems to be a language that supports a lot of programming paradigms very well, wouldn't it be beneficial to learn people declarative programming using D for a little and from there expose them to other programming styles in thesame language to lower the barrier of entry? I agree that D being a multi-paradigm language makes it ideal as a vehicle for teaching various paradigms. New paradigms can be taught without the diversion of having to start over learning a new language. Walter, I am considering teaching the programming languages course again in Spring but this time simply using D. Would you be willing to provide me with some advise in the process of converting the one that I had put together based on Dan Grossman's course at UW and which used SML and Python in addition to D. (Dan uses SML, Racket and Ruby). I would like to know if I can purely use D, or at least minimize the use of the two other languages without sacrificing the insights provided by those two languages. Your response indicates that you have a very positive outlook on such a transition and I could help knowing that I am not compromising on the quality of the student's learning experience. -- Sameer
Re: D as a college language
On Friday, 4 May 2018 at 11:35:22 UTC, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote: So i'm a college student in and what bothers me is that there seem to kind of assume programming languages don't evolve or don't get replaced by better ones. Right now if you go to college you'll most likely get tought c++, c# or java for any comp sci degree. While these languages are industrial standards, they all have their drawbacks. And one drawback that looks important for teaching is flexibility in expressiveness. From my experience college students seem to have problems translating their often declarative thought process into actual semi compile-able code that runs in a given language. Since D seems to be a language that supports a lot of programming paradigms very well, wouldn't it be beneficial to learn people declarative programming using D for a little and from there expose them to other programming styles in thesame language to lower the barrier of entry? I think D could play a bigger role in education since its such a "clean" language that is flexible but doesn't have any real gotcha "features". Its also a language that could potentially be used over someones entire college career as the primary language. If this would be achieved there would be a higher income flow into the industry of young D programmers which will pollute other programmers with the D mind and featureset. I thought it might help if I mentioned that I successfully used D as one of three languages to teach the Programming Languages course at Vassar College last Fall. The main reason I ended up using three languages was this: 1. Most undergraduate CS courses that I sampled (at UW, for one taught by Dan Grossman, among others) use a core functional programming language such as (S)ML which really helps in solidifying some of the principles of programming languages—the concept of environment, scope, binding; functions as values; curry, filter, map, etc. Plus it has a version that comes with a REPL and really helps students explore it. That said, it is not a "industrial strength" language, and since I also wanted to empasize on the pragmatic aspects, it could not be the only one. 2. I briefly introduced the concept of logic programming using Prolog, but I couldn't really spend too much time on it and so cannot count it as another language 3. When I asked students what language they would like to choose—given the choice, most of the class leaned towards Python. That plus the likelihood of them actually using it at some point, I decided to cover some programming language aspects using it over two-three weeks. It also has some fascinating feature sets (dunder methods, some meta programming niceties, etc.) and being interpreted language, provides a nice complementary view. 4. The rest of the course used D. I used both Andrei Alexandrescu's book and Ali's book to generate the course content. I was fortunate to have a stack of slides from the Andrei himself. And even more fortunate, as it happened to spend a Boston D meetup dinner with the two and Steven Schv-guy. I have been in love with D ever since I firsr started reading Andrei's book in 2010, and it was really quite something that I could use it in an undergraduate CS curriculum seven years later. Originally, I was hoping to use D for the entire course, but then given various aspects of the course, and the styles in which it is being taught many places made me change things a bit. Oh, and I should mention that I did get a few slides from Chuck Allison who uses D to teach a small part of his course at UVU. If you haven't seen his talk at, I believe the first/second DConf at UVU, I would highly recommend it. The icing on the cake was that Andrei was able to visit Vassar in November and give a talk on his Fastware muse (if I may call it that). He was an instant success! I am scheduled to teach the course again next Spring, and I am trying to figure out how/if I can use more D than I did the last time without sacrificing some of the goodness that (S)ML brings to the table. That way I can cover more programming paradigms that D brings to life—built in unittests, contract programming, delegates, and many many more—with a flair. Any thoughts/pointers that this wonderful community can provide would be very much appreciated. -- Sameer
Re: Ali's slides from his C++Now talk
On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 at 23:31:48 UTC, Joakim wrote: Enjoying going through these: http://ddili.org/AliCehreli_CppNow_2017_Competitive_Advantage_with_D.no_pause.pdf Ali really has a gift for explaining stuff, we're lucky to have him. I must say that I really enjoyed the slides as well! Hopefully will get to watching the video at some point. -- Sameer
Re: [your code here]
On Thursday, 1 December 2016 at 14:26:11 UTC, ringo starr wrote: swello.edu This post screams Captcha! Just to make sure it was not a false positive, I went to the (non-existent) URL. On the bright side, the forum seems to be widely circulated—enough to attract spammers! As far as I can tell, spamming this list is not quite straightforward to begin with... Yay, D! -- Sameer
Re: Mir GLAS is a C library and passes Natlib's test suite! And questions :-)
On Friday, 28 October 2016 at 06:31:19 UTC, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote: On Friday, 28 October 2016 at 03:44:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: On 10/27/16 3:59 AM, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote: [...] I must plead ignorance on the finer interface details, but from what I am reading this seems like an amazing development. I am so happy that that D has a solid base for GPU work. The post from a few weeks back with performance details compared to BLAS and others was quite impressive. details I was just telling Steve at the Boston meetup yesterday that libmir and now MirGLAS has really made me jump up and down to start using D seriously for some language processing work I have been hoping to use it for. I have been an observer and reader for several years now, but haven't taken the leap. Yet. Hopefully soon... -- Sameer [...] Cool work! One thing I'd want to understand is how to use Mir GLAS from within D itself. If it's a straight C interface, there seems to be a fair amount of friction (we have a D program communicating with a D library through the uncomfortable confines of a C interface). Is that the case? Should there be a way to short circuit the C API and use a more expressive D interface? (Looking e.g. at Eigen, it's meant to allow people using it from C++ to take advantage of a C++-specific smooth interface.) GLAS has 2 APIs: GLAS(ndslise) and BLAS(fortran). Both APIs has C/C++ and D headers. D headers contains aliases with unified names like in core.stdc.tgmath. So, extern(C) interface for GLAS is comfortable and looks like: gemm(alpha, a, b, beta, c); // calls glas_?gemm The latest ndslice PR to stable branch solves a problem in case of const and immutable a and b. https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4873 GLAS does not have syntax like Eigen, i mean c = a * b; This syntax can be a part of another package for scripting like syntax. See also Q&A https://github.com/libmir/mir-glas#why-glas-does-not-have-lazy-evaluation-and-aliasing-like-eigen [...] I guess I'd like to understand the dynamics better here. The main reason is compilation time (1 secs+) and template bloat (50 KB +). OpenBLAS size is more than 20 MB. GLAS is smaller, but it is not something lightweight like `sort`. Assume you are buildings a large D projects one-by-one file in parallel. It can be builded during minutes and its size can be >100 MB, only because GLAS. So, having an extern(C) layers is good practice to keep interface clear and compile time small. [...] You have all support from Walter and myself for integrating GLAS with Phobos. Before that I'd want to make sure we slice and dice things properly. Awesome! I am happy to read this) [...] That would be an interesting precedent. We should talk about it next week. (My knee-jerk reaction is if we're worth our salt we should release Phobos often enough to obviate the need for this. But the notion of hot-swapping subcomponents is cool too.) Some concepts can be found on a slides from my today's talk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w1cQ8vDluglRIt8Qdnm-sY7kqxoKZxbPEWW6tR3lPpo/edit?usp=sharing Thanks, Andrei Best regards, Ilya
Re: Interest in Boston area D meetups?
On Tuesday, 17 May 2016 at 13:17:35 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: Is anyone interested in having D meetups in Boston area? I'm not familiar with really any other locals (well, there is one person I know of :) -Steve I would love to be part of the Boston D community. Maybe we can meet on/near the D line? Could not help making a pun. :-) -- Sameer
Re: [OT] On Giving Presentations
On Sunday, 22 May 2016 at 18:35:16 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html#expository A lot of us wind up giving presentations now and then, and all of us can improve. This article has some great advice, and is a good read, too. Very nice pointer. Although it is 20 years old (from circa 1996), it still makes so much sense. -- Sameer
