What Makes A Programming Language Good

[bearophile]

Vladimir Panteleev:

> So, you want D to force people to do more work, out of no practical reason?

When you develop a large system, the nice hand holding that works with small systems often stops working (because the whole language ecosystem is often not much designed for hierarchical decomposition of problems). In this situation you are often on your own, and often the automatic features work against you because their work and actions are often opaque. So those programmer develop a mistrust toward a compiler+tools that hold too much your hand.

A related problem is visible in old automatic pilot systems. They are very useful, but when their operative limits are reached (because some emergency has pushed the plane state outside them), they suddenly stop working, and leave the human pilots in bad waters because the humans don't have a lot of time to awake from their sleepy state and understand the situation well enough to face the problems. So those old automatic pilot systems were actively dangerous (new automatic pilot systems have found ways to reduce such problems).

To solve the situation, the future automatic D tools need to work in a very transparent way, giving all the information in a easy to use and understand way, showing all they do in a very clear way. So when they fail or when they stop being enough, the programmer doesn't need to work three times harder to solve the problems manually.

Bye,
bearophile