Scott Meyers' DConf 2014 keynote "The Last Thing D Needs"

[Timon Gehr via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 05/29/2014 05:35 AM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Wed, 28 May 2014 16:07:08 -0700
> Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> Some of the inconsistencies you mentioned and Brian mentioned in his
>> talk are actually the result of consistencies.
>>
>> I know this is a bit of a difficult thing to wrap one's head around,
>> but having something be mathematically consistent and humanly
>> consistent are often at severe odds.
>
> I don't disagree, but I also think that we need to be very careful when
> they're at odds, because it tends to result in buggy code when the rules are
> inconsistent from the human's perspective. In some cases, it's best to better
> educate the programmer, whereas in others, it's better to just make it
> consistent for the programmer - especially when you're dealing with a case
> where being consistent with one thing means being inconsistent with another.
> Overall, I think that we've done a decent job of it, but there are definitely
> places (e.g. static array declarations) where I think we botched it.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

I think this is not a point about "consistency", but about intuition.

In any case, simply reversing the order for static array types using an 
ad-hoc rewrite rule would be a huge wart, even more severe than the 
other points you raised, and we definitely wouldn't be trading one kind 
of consistency for another.

(In any case, the most elegant solution is to simply not have special 
syntax for language built-in types.)