D: A language without focus

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

gabe wrote:

> In article <e2pgfg$4s3$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, nick says...
>>
>>Sounds to me as though you are really eager to have D1.0 right this
>>moment and you are frustrated with all the things that aren't working
>>just the way you like them.
>>
> 
> Well, you're only partially right about that.  I do have some
> dissapointment
> that things don't exactly 'work'.  I think that anything that doesn't just
> 'work' for people coming to the language (or even working in it for a long
> time), tends to make D look inflexible and amaturish compared to other
> efforts. That is not to say that D is in any way either of those things --
> I think it has the potential to be very robust and quite user-friendly,
> but in order for the language to really succeed, you're going to have to
> convince more than just me. In order to succeed, you're going to have to
> convince all the other beginning, 10 cent hackers out there that D is a
> language of the future -- that it HAS a
> future -- at the center of a stable and growing community.  All this feeds
> into
> the notions that I outlined in my first message.  Design a system -- not
> just part of the language -- to foster growth and stability, and people
> will search
> YOU out, and not the other way around.  The keys to that system revolves
> around finding what is necessary within the community and then designing
> toward those goals.

I wonder why I didn't see this message the first time around... Anyway, I
got my morning coffee now :)

Your thoughts are all sound, but the community IS building what it needs. As
I said in my last post about Java (which applies to C# too), the
infrastructure at the bottom there is NOT created by the community, but by
the backing corporations. Which is why D still might end up as you
envision, but it will take time :)

> 
> So, with that in mind, let me offer up some ideas that I have been
> ruminating upon.
> 
> First: The Build Mechanism

Build is an extremely powerful tool that I in general find well documented,
but it is a command line tool, which probably is not whay you have in mind?
But build should be easily usable from an IDE (and I think it is used in
several already).

> 
> ---D source---

Please no XML in the source code, it is NOT easily readable (or writable).
As has been said DDoc already fills this space (although it still could be
improved) and it is possible to make additional tools to process the output
into a fullblown Javadoc style documentation, or maybe something even
better. CandyDoc which can be found under the Helix project at DSource is a
starting point for what is possible.

> 
> Second:

> ------ BRL - Basic Runtime Library ------
> 
> ----- ERL - Extended Runtime Library ------

I like these ideas (it is not as if they haven't been suggested before), but
I agree with Anders in that the BRL part of it is mostly there, he suggests
Phobos, I think Ares got it even clearer, although it is not as complete
yet.

As for the ERL, I think that will be much more difficult to get right,
although it would be nice to have a "standard" that could be shipped with
the compiler. Walter already has suggested to have a standard GUI, and
other packages might follow. I guess if we as a community actually can
agree on a setup, he might include it all.

The reason I think it might be difficult, is because D in itself gives us
many more possibilities than VM based languages such as Java and C#, and
because we might care even more about speed, we probably will pick and
choose the right library for us even more than others do, similar to what
happens in the C/C++ world.

Oh, and AFAIK, an effort to make a Qt inspired library in D has just been
started :D Just to give is just a tiny bit more choice ;) Or possibly
because someone got tired of hearing about how good Qt is and why it should
be ported to D...

--
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource & #D: larsivi