Wish: Variable Not Used Warning

[Bruno Medeiros]

Walter Bright wrote:
> The reason for treating warnings as errors when warnings are enabled is 
> so that, for a long build, they don't scroll up and off your screen and 
> go unnoticed.

Dear gods... These are the kind of comments that make me cringe deep 
inside, and honestly worry me about the future of D. :(

Looking at the output of a compiler in a console is a thing of the past. 
It's fraking obsolote. It's only done when you're hobbying or toying 
with the language. No one who does serious development is going to do 
that. What you do is use an IDE with a minimum of intelligence, that 
presents to you the warnings in a sensible way. Here's an example from CDT:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-eclipse-ganymede/

Before some people here say they don't use an IDE, but instead use 
<editor foo with syntax highlighting and little more than that> and are 
fine with it, well, ask yourselves, are you doing any serious 
development, or just toying around? If you were in a multi-team, 6+ 
months project, working with such tools, do you think you would perform 
the same as the same team, with a proper toolchain?
Head my words: you wouldn't. Thinking otherwise is a nuisance.

And it's even worse if you're Walter. Basing such language/tool design 
issues on outdated notions is a danger to D's development. And it's not 
just the "looking at compiler output in console", there are plenty of 
other cases of this mentality.
Walter, you need to shed some of your outdated notions of the software 
development process and think of the *modern* (present and future) 
development models that exist, or D will risk heavily retarded adoption 
(or even failure).

I'm dead serious and I want to "record" this message for future 
reference, especially if things don't go well (which may not be obvious 
though).


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D