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

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:51:19 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> 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.

Beauty will save the world.

But it's not mere indulgence because an accurate image of reality 
is beautiful, and programming is a human activity and emotional 
and psychological considerations cannot be wished away.

I can put up with the white-space stuff, but the lack of 
compile-time checking disturbs me and it seems like one needs the 
scarce resource of discipline more to write good code there.  (I 
do not claim to be an expert on Python).