So You Want To Write Your Own Language

[The Old One via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 16:37:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 24/12/15 02:08, Walter Bright wrote:
>> This has resurfaced on Reddit:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xya5v/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language/
>
> In the comments, about the cluttered syntax. For the 
> attributes, due to legacy reasons, it seems like D got all the 
> defaults wrong. System instead of safe, mutable instead of 
> immutable, not pure instead of pure and so on. We might not be 
> able to get rid of any attributes but if some of these defaults 
> were different perhaps it would not be necessary to use so many 
> attributes all the time.
>
> I know that many here don't agree but personally I think the 
> language could have less syntax it had AST macros. Some syntax 
> that is built-in now could be moved to library code in the form 
> of macros.

I agree. As we all know, these choices have much to do with 
trying not to disturb all the welcome people from C/C++. But now 
that D is becoming a more self-confident language, and a larger 
percentage of newcomers to D have other backgrounds than C/C++, 
it is becoming increasingly important to have the language "do 
the Right Thing" from the outset.

By now the former C/C++ programmer has to learn an entirely new 
language, as compared to 5 or especially 10 years ago, when D 
could (well, at least sarcastically) be described as just another 
Dialect of C.

Today, D is a proud and strong, and not even a new, language, and 
the Default choices of system/safe, (im)mutable, (not)safe, etc., 
should be based only on choices that are obvious when we look at 
D now and in the foreseeable future. Not on what the past was.