Basic coding style

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Tue Nov 23 16:27:01 PST 2010


On 11/23/10 5:32 PM, Brainy wrote:
> Bearophile seriously go cure yourself. Your obsession of making D
> __seem__ good fails badly. People adopt D because of your
> advertisement on various forums and tutorials. They expect much, but
> dive deep in shit in return. You can't beat the authors in arrogance.
> They shamelessly defend bad coding practices like this.

Quite honest, I wish my main problem were shoddy practices in naming 
functions. Anyhow, fact is, it's all true: expandtabs was taken verbatim 
from Python 
(http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/string_expandtabs.htm). I 
personally think the whole function could be deprecated. tolower has 
virtually become a collocation because C has had it forever. Besides, I 
defined the function tolowerInPlace to keep a parallel with tolower, 
which creates a new string.

New code I introduced follows the convention that types start with 
uppercase and values and function names start with lowercase.

Overall this doesn't seem significant evidence of shameless defense of 
bad practices stemmed in arrogance. I trust that someone sufficiently 
motivated could construct a better case.

> You also
> can't change the way amateur followers think. D is a better C++,
> nothing more. You want much more. Why stick with D? The ratio of
> successful proposals would be much higher in communities of more
> experimental languages. You also face tons of bugs with dmd. No other
> reference compiler is as buggy and non-free. Think about it. This is
> an obsession. You owe nothing to the developers. They don't
> appreciate your skills in any case. There will be no D3 in the near
> future. I hope the puremagic bugzilla will accidentally wipe all your
> excellent proposals to make you realize this language has no future.
> TYVM for your attention.

Bearophile's output has made very significant progress since e.g. 1-2 
years ago, and I am very pleased to see that. At the same time, I must 
say I cannot allow myself to agree with all he says just to be nice, and 
I wouldn't rate the average of his contributions as excellent as of this 
time (he'd be the first to say he has much learning ahead of him 
although, again, the improvement has been visible). My perception is 
that less experienced designers tend to ascribe more value to his 
points, which is quite ironic since you wanted to implicitly distinguish 
yourself as savvy.

Overall I think bearophile is receiving fair and well-deserved 
attention, appreciation, and social proof for his contributions to this 
community, and I find this backhanded attempts at discouraging him quite 
unbecoming.


Andrei


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list