RFC on range design for D2

[Bruno Medeiros]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 
> This is because I make next to no money so I can afford to work on basic 
> research, which is "important" in a long-ranging way. Today's computing 
> is quite disorganized and great energy is expended on gluing together 
> various pieces, protocols, and interfaces. I've worked in that 
> environment quite a lot, and dealing with glue can easily become 90% of 
> a day's work, leaving only little time to get occupied with a real 
> problem, such as making a computer genuinely smarter or at least more 
> helpful towards its user. All too often we put a few widgets on a window 
> and the actual logic driving those buttons - the "smarts", the actual 
> "work" gets drowned by details taking care of making that logic stick to 
> the buttons.
> 

Well, didn't you find a "real problem" right there (and also a very 
interesting one), in trying to make 
code/libraries/methodologies/tools/whatever that reduce those 90% of 
work in boilerplate details?
An example could the years of investment and research in ORM frameworks 
(Hibernate/EJB3, Ruby on Rails, etc.), which despite ORM technology 
having existed for quite many years, only recently has it reached a 
point where it's really easy and non-tedious to write an OO-DB 
persistence mapping.
Another possible example, regarding GUI programming like you mentioned, 
is data binding. I haven't used it myself yet, but for what they 
describe, it's purpose is indeed to reduce a lot of the complexity and 
tedium in writing code to synchronize the UI with the model/logic, and 
vice-versa.
Learning and building these kinds of stuff is, IMO, the pinnacle of 
software engineering.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D