New Article: My Experience Porting Python Dateutil's Date Parser to D

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2016 at 02:12:42PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 3/9/2016 1:55 PM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> >Hello everyone,
> >
> >I have spent the last two weeks porting the date string parsing
> >functionality from the popular Python library, dateutil, to D. I have
> >written about my experience here:
> >http://jackstouffer.com/blog/porting_dateutil.html
> >
> >The code and docs can be found here: https://github.com/JackStouffer/date-parser
> >
> >reddit:
> >https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/49qdpt/my_experience_porting_python_dateutils_date/
> >
> >
> >Let me know what you think about the article and the code.
> >
> >Thanks in advance.
> 
> I haven't read the article yet, but you'll get more interest by
> putting a summary as the first comment on reddit.

I read the article.  While I'm no Python expert (do have a little
experience with it mainly through using SCons as a build system for my
personal projects), I can totally sympathize with the annoyances of
using a dynamically-typed language, as well as dodgy iterator designs
like __next__. (I've not had to deal with __next__ in Python so far, but
*have* worked with C/C++ code that basically iterates that way, and it's
not pretty.)

Totally agree that if you can convert something to D in about a week's
worth of work, it's totally worth it.  D is just a much more comfortable
language to work in (to me, anyway -- this is highly subjective,
obviously), and, provided you don't do anything silly, generally gives
you better performance than many of the alternatives out there.  Even
when it doesn't perform the best without hand-tweaking, I'd still prefer
it for general use, because of nice sanity features such as built-in
unittests (now that I've gotten used to them, I sorely miss them in
every other language!), sane template syntax, etc..

Nice article.


T

-- 
He who does not appreciate the beauty of language is not worthy to bemoan its flaws.