A summary of D's design principles

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 09/18/2010 12:31 PM, retard wrote:
> Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:43:45 +0200, Lutger wrote:
>
>> retard wrote:
>>
>>> Sat, 18 Sep 2010 03:44:30 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know nothing about Alice.
>>>
>>> You SHOULD probably study the ML family of languages a bit more
>>> closely. It feels like we're having a conversation with a dinosaur.
>>>
>>> After all, in the functional programming world, ML languages are the
>>> closest competitor of D. Why? Both try to be safe, modular, strict (=
>>> not lazy by default), functional, garbage collected, often compile to
>>> native code, and have an expressive static type system with inference.
>>>
>>> Alice is the Alice ML dialect, http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/
>>
>> Do you know if Alice is suited for practical programming, any
>> experience? I know only that it is somewhat related to Oz which had a
>> reasonably extensive ecosystem, but it doesn't seem to be developed
>> anymore.
>
> Unfortunately no, but the web site gives an impression that the
> development has stalled few years ago. I think Alice used the Oz's
> runtime, but is now a separate project with a new backend. If I'd write
> something significant commercial code in any functional language, I might
> choose F# or Haskell instead.

Then probably it's fair to not chastise Walter for not having heard of 
it. (FWIW I'm familiar with ML and somewhat so with OCaml, but I only 
vaguely knew of a language called Alice and didn't know it was related 
to ML.)

Andrei