Interview at Lang.NEXT

[Ary Borenszweig via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 6/4/14, 3:33 PM, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:
> On Wednesday, 4 June 2014 at 17:31:56 UTC, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> On 6/4/14, 1:27 PM, Meta wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 4 June 2014 at 06:19:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/27911b/conversation_with_andrei_alexandrescu_all_things/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Andrei
>>>
>>> When that person made the statement about expressing his mental model in
>>> a simpler way that is still somewhat fast, and then optimizing/adding
>>> annotations/etc. after he gets it working, I kept expecting you to
>>> mention RDMD and D's ability to be used for scripting, and
>>> purity/nothrow/@safe/@nogc inference. This is an advantage D has over
>>> Rust and C++. With Rust especially, there is no way to avoid dealing
>>> with its pointer semantics, as they permeate the language. With D, you
>>> can write in a C or even Python-like way (while not having to worry
>>> about ownership, memory, etc. as the GC handles it for you), but you can
>>> then optimize and add annotations to your code to get a lot more
>>> performance and safety once your initial implementation is working.
>>
>> You still have to worry about types, though.
>
> But using function templates and the like you can still get fairly
> 'Python-like' code in D.  I find dealing with types to be one of the
> areas that requires the 'least' amount of mental effort in software
> development. I don't understand why people see 'untyped' languages as
> simpler for the most part.

I was actually talking about having to specify types everywhere, like in 
function signatures, the fields of classes and structs, etc.

You can still have a language that feels dynamic but is statically 
typed. The compiler catches type-related bugs for you, and you can 
prototype something very fast. Then you can add type annotations (if you 
want). I wouldn't say this language is 'untyped'.

One such language is Julia.