Shared pain

[bearophile]

Steve Teale:

> I admire your dedication to language theory and purity, but there are 
> many who'd translate that to impracticality and obscurity.

I like that idea about immutables & strong pure functions, but it was not an idea of mine :-) That enhancement request in Bugzilla is not written by me.


> I came to D in the first place because I found it refreshingly clear and 
> easy to use after C++ and Java. But now it's getting painful.

But strongly pure functions are already present in D. So it's morally good to push its usages and implications as far as possible, otherwise we are wasting possibilities. That implicit cast idea is another implication of purity. It's a clean thing, it's not a hack or workaround or a dangerous thing or something like that, it comes from a clean & logical reasoning about consequences of purity. So it can't be compared to many other dirty things present in D2. It actually helps to clean the programs a little, because removes the need for one important use case of casts. So I can't agree. There is a large complexity difference between extending the logical implications of an already present feature, and adding a true special case.


> What's your estimate of how long it will be before D is a stable language?

I have no idea, I am not that expert, and probably no one knows. D is developed by a small group of devs, and despite in life you seem to "need" to be fast everything you do (for example because otherwise others do it before you and you miss the train), D is not a commercial project, so it has less timing pressures. Often commercial software projects produce a worse result, despite having more resources, because of the strict development timing requirements.

If you look at the PyPy Python project it's may years out of schedule, it was started by lot of money coming from European Union, but in the end it may deliver something good any way. Open Source projects too need to respect some timing schedules, but in OS you are sometimes able to say "it will be done when it will be done," while in most commercial software projects you can't say that.

The "feature" we are describing here probably needs only few lines of code to be implemented in the compiler (but I can't be sure) and it's backward-compatible (because it removes the need of a cast in some cases), so it's a kind of additive change.

Bye,
bearophile