Just where has this language gone wrong?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 18:24:04 -0400
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 7/21/12 6:16 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > Yea. I used Java in college and ever since then I've been a fan of
> > non-verbose systax - ie syntax that's the *opposite* of Java ;)
> 
> On slide 19 of the OSCON slides there's this sample:
> 
> auto s = ["abc", "a", "xz"];
> auto m = s.argmin!((x) => x.length);
> 
> People in the audience were quite pleasantly surprised to figure that 
> although there's no mention of a type, that code is all the compiler 
> needs to figure there's a lambda that takes a string and returns an 
> unsigned integer etc.
> 

Exactly. And what many people (depressingly) don't realize, is
that dynamic typing (or OO boxing) is NOT needed to achieve that.

I was actually impressed with that slide, too, but for a different
reason: I've come across need for a function like argmin on occasion,
but I didn't know it existed (Don't recall if it was actually in D, may
have been another language I was using). That really is a fantastically
useful function.