RFC on range design for D2

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 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.

This hardly characterizes or answers my point. Of course wherever 
there's difficulty there's opportunity for automation, and research in 
software engineering is alive and well. My point was that much effort in 
the industry today is expended on dealing with effects instead of 
fighting the causes.

Andrei