"Competitive Advantage with D" is one of the keynotes at C++Now 2017

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 04/28/2017 06:11 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>>
>> That's the thing about C++: The right way is the obscure way, and the
>> straightforward way is the wrong way. And yesterday's right way is
>> today's wrong way. And apparently (it would seem), the only way NOT to
>> completely fuck *everything* up is to become an expert on every corner
>> of the language, and STAY an expert on all the latest changes. In the
>> immortal words (and voice) of Duke Nukem: "What a mess!"
>
> Yep, this always reminds me of:
>
> 	https://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
>

That is *awesome*!

Although, I always saw Eddie Scissors as more of a retelling of 
Frankenstein.

>
> D is not without its own flaws and WAT-worthy dark corners, mind you,
> but in spite it its warts, I still prefer D any day over the masochistic
> labyrinth of 99 wrong ways to do the same thing (and only 1 "right" way
> -- until next year) that is C++.
>

Yea, I really think it's more important than many of us realize to heed 
Herb Sutter's warning and not allow too much worrying about backwards 
compatibility thus leading D down the same path. When I see people here 
fret over "Yea, but it may cause breakage", on one hand I understand 
that can be the responsible stance, but OTOH it also makes me cringe 
because it's one more "cat" nibbling us to death - I don't want to see 
it follow in C++'s footsteps and allow these unfixed mistakes build up 
and damage what made D great in the first place. Especially since "small 
things that add up to more than the sum of their parts" is a big part of 
what makes D good in the first place.


> The latest WAT I found in D is this one, see if you can figure it out:
> How an alternation between two character types ends up being int is
> beyond me, but even more inscrutible is why ch : wch produces int but
> wch : dch produces uint.

Ouch. Although yea, guess that's another good reason to just decide 
Unicode == UTF-8 and be done with it ;) (I don't even care about UTF-8's 
supposed bloat in eastern alphabets - it's freaking *text* either way. 
Tale of Genji would be what, some tens of MB in UTF-8? Bah, trim down a 
few images and overengineered file formats and multimedia clutter if you 
need a shave a few measly MB so badly. If UTF-32'd won out, the complete 
works of Shakespeare would in the same boat, some tens of MB in the 
"wrong" format and we *still* wouldn't have the ASCII-simplicity of code 
points being equal to graphemes anyway. It's *text*. If your software's 
footprint or bandwidth is dominated by the size of a bloated text 
format, then *congratulations*, you officially have one of the smallest, 
most succinct software footprints in the world, so smile and be happy!)