Is D still alive?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/27/11 8:02 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Tomek Sowiński wrote:
>> Walter Bright napisał:
>>
>>> bearophile wrote:
>>>> Walter:
>>>>
>>>>> The reason that took so long was that few people were using DbC
>>>>> effectively, so it was a low priority. I originally had high hopes
>>>>> that
>>>>> DbC would produce dramatic improvements in code quality, but the real
>>>>> world results were disappointing.<
>>>> After many years and many failed hopes, I think there is no silver
>>>> bullet
>>>> in programming, so maybe nothing is able to produce "dramatic
>>>> improvements in code quality".
>>>>
>>>> But even if this is true, some things are able to improve coding a bit,
>>>> like unit testing, a well semantically defined language, syntax
>>>> coloring,
>>>> quick compile-run cycles, OOP for certain kinds of programs, DbC,
>>>> and so
>>>> on. Each of such things improve the situation only a little, but such
>>>> improvements pile up and most programmers when have tried them don't
>>>> want
>>>> to go back to miss those things.
>>> Unit testing has produced a dramatic improvement in coding.
>>
>> Yes, it's big. Funny that it's not really a technical change but a
>> cultural
>> one -- D just leaves no excuses to even the most stone-age programmers
>> not to
>> test their code.
>
> I was talking about this with Andrei the other day. D's focus on making
> it easy to do things the right way has paid off handsomely, though this
> is not at all obvious from reading a feature list. It only becomes clear
> when you use it for a while, and then try to go back to the way you were
> doing things before.

Although this might as well be true, I generally try to avoid such 
arguments. The problem with it is it's non-falsifiable 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability) so it has a certain stench 
coming with it.

I've seen such a claim in Go fora: you know, once you get to really use 
Go, you won't feel the need for generics. Meh.

I try to _never_ use such an argument. If I'm to convince anyone that D 
rocks, it won't be by means of unfalsifiable statements. It will be by 
showing code that knocks your socks off. The kind of code that makes you 
think: "If I'm to write that in language X, I need to give away 
desirable traits A, B, and C. Damn!"

> I think one of the reasons DbC has not paid off is it still requires a
> significant investment of effort by the programmer. It's too easy to not
> bother.

One issue with DbC is that its only significant advantage is its 
interplay with inheritance. Otherwise, scope() in conjunction with 
assert works with less syntactic overhead. So DbC tends to shine with 
large and deep hierarchies... but large and deep hierarchies are not 
that a la mode anymore.


Andrei