OT; Donald Knuth on beauty, efficiency, and the programmer as artist

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:05:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> I appreciate that many of us have better things to do.  But I 
> had been thinking about why I find D appealing, and how I would 
> get this across to future partners, and had also been thinking 
> about various forum comments equating measurement with science, 
> and so I found this Knuth piece highly thought-provoking.
>
> Because it goes against the grain of the prevailing tendency, I 
> shouldn't expect many to agree.  But there is nothing wrong 
> with appealing to minority opinion, provided one does not 
> become a crank.  In a sense that is in any case part of how I 
> make a living.

I completely agree with you about the aesthetic appeal of writing 
and reading D, it is one of the major draws of the language to 
me.  I've recently been dealing with some C code and it feels 
like going back to punch cards by comparison.  It is not a minor 
issue and Walter has often talked about optimizing for it.

The white-space formatting requirements of Python were one of the 
main reasons I rejected it early on.  Call it a superficial, 
knee-jerk reaction if you like, but I can't be bothered with a 
language that won't even let me insert temporary debugging code 
without formatting it just right.