DeRailed DSL (was Re: compile-time regex redux)

[kris]

Walter Bright wrote:
> kris wrote:
> 
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> The flashy stuff, though, is the stuff that piques peoples' interests 
>>> enough to give D a try.
>>
>>
>> Bling is very much in the eye of the beholder, and often has the 
>> inverse effect?
> 
> 
> If it is perceived as being *just* bling, it will have the reverse 
> effect. If you can show, however, that it solves otherwise intractable 
> or time-wasting problems, you get interest.

Absolutely.

If you can successfully do that for, say, dev managers, then so much the 
better. On the other hand, giving such ppl a reason to fear adoption 
would be a terrible mistake. As you probably know, commercial shops tend 
to be more than a bit conservative when it comes to code.

Even companies perceived as progressive care deeply about ensuring the 
code is 'pedestrian' in nature. Google, for example, outlawed C++ 
templates. They did this because their experience showed such code was 
unmaintainable, more often than not. In the hands of the masses, such 
tools are often used for creating a language within a language, and 
everyone's version has a personal stamp: MyDSL

It's the old story about great power requiring great responsibility. 
Should the language be penalized for that? No. Might it be viewed that 
way? Sure. Just being "right" is never enough in such an environment.

In no way am I saying "oh, all that meta-stuff is poppycock", as someone 
had suggested to me. I personally /like/ a touch of DSL here and there 
(have been shot-down in the past for exactly that). Instead, my personal 
concerns (when it comes to D) are based purely around three things:

1) is it of notable or daily value to 50%+ or more of users?
2) does it further delay fixing existing features that match #1?
3) does it have /real/ potential to hinder adoption due to ignorance, 
religion, sexual preferences, or the weather?

Those are all arguable, of course. Programmers are notoriously fickle 
when it comes to #3. But my concern over that one is the commercial dev 
shops; the likes of Google, Oracle, SAP, Yahoo, along with every single 
company that currently uses Java instead of C++

Thus; shouting from the rooftops that D is all about meta-code, and DSL 
up-the-wazzoo, may well provoke a backlash from the very people who 
should be embracing the language. I'd imagine Andrei would vehemently 
disagree, but so what? The people who will ultimately be responsible for 
"allowing" D through the door don't care about fads or technical 
superiority; they care about costs. And the overwhelming cost in 
software development today, for the type of companies noted above, is 
maintenance. For them, software dev is already complex enough. In all 
the places I've worked or consulted, in mutiple countries, and since the 
time before Zortech C, pedestrian-code := maintainable-code := less 
overall cost.

All IMO

- Kris