RoR, Judge Judy, and little old ladies

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

Robby wrote:
> Also, in my opinion the best part about trying to compete with 
> technologies in problem domains allows you to open your eyes about some 
> improvements that may help D as a whole. Consider some of the things 
> that Ruby does to make it so easy, reflective abilities, dynamic 
> generation and runtime type information.
> 
> Now obviously D isn't going to turn into a dynamic language, but 
> exposing such traits that D could help a static typed langauge approach 
> could help us all in the end. - such as runtime type information.

Definitely. RTTI and reflection are good to have will probably make it 
in D (as I mentioned, as a couple of the many applications of static 
introspection). The runtime code generation issue is much more 
problematic, so a alternative approach is to do compile-time generation 
for select modules. Running the compiler to generate code will be not 
much slower than running the interpreter of a competing language. The 
advantage is that the resulting code will be easier to make correct and 
faster.

Let me put it this way. If all you need to do is recompile a couple of 
modules when the database schema changes (a process that is easy to 
automate), then this might be more attractive than a scheme that does a 
lot of busywork at runtime to adapt itself dynamically to a structure 
that seldom changes, and to fail "late" when inconsistencies in the code 
are revealed.


Andrei