Beta 2.079.0

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, February 23, 2018 09:48:33 Norm via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> [snip]
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 04:06:23 UTC, psychoticRabbit
>
> wrote:
> > Third, making D more and more like a quick scripting/hacking
> > language (by removing or hiding so called 'noise', is not a
> > good idea in my opinion. That too seemed to be a motivator for
> > at some aspect of the change.
>
> This import feature and surrounding discussion I couldn't care
> less about but I have to chime in and disagree with this
> particular point. Ability to quickly script in D was a big
> selling point for D at my workplace, I'd say *the* feature that
> got uninterested developers listening and trying the language.
> Being able to replace their Python scripts with a fast native
> language that is also used for application and drivers
> development was a winning formula.

I don't know that scripts are really all that big a deal, since being able
to slap #/usr/bin/env rdmd at the top really just saves you from having to
compile the binary yourself, but I do use that functionality from time to
time, and regardless of whether that functionality is supported, being able
to write small programs to do stuff is invaluable. I do frequently use shell
scripts when stuff is simple, but it doesn't take much before it's just
easier to write them in D, and on Windows, I sure don't want to be writing
batch scripts. So, being able to reasonably write small D programs to
perform simple tasks is huge. And regardless of the scripting support, D
itself makes that _way_ nicer than C/C++ does.

Writing programs that are hundreds of thousands or millions of lines long is
definitely not D's only use case.

- Jonathan M Davis