Type safety + auto = win!

[David Nadlinger]

You might want to turn this into a blog post. This way it'd much 
better usable for … ehm … propaganda purposes than a forum 
entry. Just sayin'. ;)

David


On Friday, 27 July 2012 at 22:18:56 UTC, Nathan M. Swan wrote:
> A story:
>
> Playing around with functional programming, I started trying to 
> implement interesting functions in Lisp. It all went well until 
> "permute", a function which isn't that complicated but involves 
> lists, lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists. This was so 
> confusing and complicated that I gave up.
>
> More recently, I tried it again in Haskell. It took less than 
> twenty minutes! The reason was Haskell's type declarations, 
> which made it so much easier to think about what was going in 
> and out.
>
> How this relates to D:
>
> The type system can often get annoying, and become a pain (e.g. 
> Java), hence the popularity of dynamic typing 
> (Python/Ruby/Ecmascript). But when thinking about complicated 
> algorithms and systems, they are a great structuring force. 
> Which is part of why I love D: "auto" and "Variant" lets you 
> forget about a lot of it, but you can still be explicit when it 
> is important.
>
> My two cents,
> NMS