OSCON 2012 notes

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Fri Jul 20 23:48:57 PDT 2012


Am 21.07.2012 07:14, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
> I'm back from OSCON 2012, where my talk has enjoyed a somewhat
> unexpected good reception (OSCON is not the most down-D's-alley audience).
>
> The talk abstract is at
> http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/23888 and the
> slides are at
> http://www.slideshare.net/andreialexandrescu1/generic-programming-galore-using-d.
> There will be a video up some time in the future for the entire talk.
>

Thanks for putting them up. Eagerly waiting for the video.

> It would be really cool if we could enhance D's offering in the Web
> arena. People were really attracted by the notion of a language not
> requiring many type annotations, yet with the exploratory feel of a
> dynamic language. A small framework or simply a couple of standard
> library components that would make e.g. Vladimir's work (on
> forum.lang.org) or Adam Ruppe's work easy to assemble from preexisting
> parts would be just awesome.

We need something like std.database for web development, which as far as
I know is currently on hold.

WinRT support would also be a nice feature. Need to spend some time 
checking how to work with type libraries.

>
> Go has enjoyed a stronger presence in numbers:
> http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/23910,
> http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/23906, but my
> perception (confirmed by ratings) is that the reception has been a tad
> colder.
>

Go earns a lot of brownie points from geeks due to Google factor and 
having Plan 9 authors in the team.

I've watched most of their presentations, to be honest their typical web 
application PR demo with goroutines, can be easily reproduced in many 
languages.

Even the features that are sold as why one should pick Go, are no
novelty for the developers that have good CS backgrounds in compiler
design and implementation.

I already had many discussions on gonuts regarding lack of abstractions 
in the language like enumerations and generics, or the distinction 
between make and new.

The Go community seems to think it is ok to make use of code generation 
tools, like the C++ compiler vendors used to do until around 1993,
when preprocessor tricks and external tools were used as a kind of generics.

With Go 2, years away this situation is hardly going to change.

After becoming disapointed with Go leaving in the past, I've come to the 
conclusion that between the two, D is a much better choice.

--
Paulo


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