Comparison chart worries

[Justin C Calvarese]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Quoting from 
> http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=431909
> 
>> I'm sorry, but some of your "comparisons" to C# are just WRONG. 
>> Period, flat out, wrong. No dynamic arrays? Try 
>> System.Collections.Generic.List<T>. No associative arrays? Try 
>> System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<T>. No aliases? Try using 
>> <class> = Alias;. There are many more on that page, so much so, I am 
>> half tempted to write a page debunking over half your comparisons.
>>
>> Your comparison sheet is EXTREMELY misleading, as you completely 
>> ignore the .NET framework, which extends C# far beyond anything D can 
>> currently do. Ignoring the presence of many of these facilities in the 
>> .NET framework is a really shady tactic to make D seem like it has 
>> several important features that C# supposedly lacks. Several other 
>> features you claim are "important" are really not (like multiple 
>> inheritance, which is dangerous to begin with).
>>
>> D is a neat language, but you need to be more honest in your comparisons.
> 
> Not directly commenting on this quote (since I'm not that familiar with 
> C#), I think we should check if the comparison really is up to date.
> 
> Other languages may have got new versions out, and some of the table 
> entries are, ehh, not that obvious to the casual reader.
> 
> While some of the more surprising answers (the yes/no stuff) are 
> explained in footnotes or on other pages, we must understand that all 
> this slashdotting etc. brings readers who don't bother reading "the fine 
> print". They may then dismiss the table (and thus D itself) as biased, 
> hyped, and regular marketing lies altogether.
> 
> I don't think we can afford it.

I think there are some really good points being made in this thread. The 
comparison chart (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/comparison.html) probably 
stirs up anger in people more often than persuading them to look into D 
more (at least as the table is currently set up).

Maybe rather than being a bunch of colorful yes's and no's, it should be 
  more "professional". Perhaps it should be "Core", "Library", "N/A" 
since much of the disagreement seems to be whether Core or Library is a 
better place to have a feature, we'll just state where it is and let 
people decide for themselves where it should be. And if it's really "not 
available" in that language, we can put "N/A".

Perhaps people won't be so angry then, and they'll continue reading the 
spec long enough to find the pages where Walter justifies why having a 
particular feature built-in is so important.

If we could make the table less controversial, that'd be a good thing. 
There are a growing number of complaints on the DocComments page, too: 
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DocComments/Comparison

I don't know C/C++/C#/Java well enough to decide if the complaints are 
justified or not, but I think some of the disagreement might come from 
the Core vs. Library issue. (Of course, Language X has that. It's in a 
library.)

-- 
jcc7