D Conference Tango Phobos

[kris]

TomD wrote:
> kris Wrote:
> [...]
>> It's odd (and frustrating) how people wind up focusing on one or two 
>> 'stylistic' things about Tango, and go ballistic over that, rather than 
>> taking a closer look. Happy to hear that you have personally taken that 
>> latter step.

> Sorry for frustrating you...but I guess Janice and I made our point
> not very clear. My first contact with Tango was around January, February this year, when it
> was about to be moved to dsource. Lacking a decent debugger for D, console output is
> extremely important. Looking at the Tango manual chapter I read about "conduits", a
> word I had to look up in the dictionary in the first place. Leo tells me it is just another word 
> for "pipe". Lots of lines about concepts, buffers, file handling, but not a single line how
> I actually can output anything to the console. 
> 
> What I find extremely useful are a couple of (simple)  examples, this is how it looks
> like, maybe a link to a comprehensive summary table, and now to the gory details.
> How do I output a string, an int, a float? How do I read them back in?
> OK, it looks like this, how do I change the formatting, and why does it look like that?
> 
> This satisfies the impatient programmer who just wants to look something up, and the 
> interested reader that wants to go into the details. The beauty of Phobos is that it can be
> seen as a libc wrapper with a couple of extensions (this is not really true, but a good first classification). Familiar ground. The documentation a bit like the FreePascal runtime
> documentation. Sometimes too terse, but you always feel like you have section 3
> of the man pages for the details. Sockets are bad in Phobos? Gee, just look at some
> C-example and do the same. 
> 
> The point (for me) is that Tango is the newcomer, with a new concept, which needs
> good points to convince people. And it is not just saying "but look, we have 600 pages
> of documentation" when it makes me feel, yes, and I need to read all of them before
> I start. 
> Enough bashing, the tutorials are quite helpful.
> 
> I hope this was not too offending, at least it was intended to be constructive.
> 
> Ciao
> Tom


Hey Tom,

Thank you, very much!

That is so refreshing to hear some *constructive* criticism! You make a 
number of valuable points: I think your suggestions make an enormous 
amount of sense, and will be encouraging this to happen as you describe. 
I wrote the IO chapter, so I know the guilty party there :p