D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 08:05:57PM +0200, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Friday, 11 May 2012 at 17:47:06 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
> >Complicated language structure? Long compilation times?
> >
> >wat.
> 
> I'd have to agree...
> 
> Several things in D are really hard to understand if you don't already
> have a C++ background:
> 
> 1. "templates": they seem to take in just about anything, and return
> just about anything. They can be pretty confusing, especially when you
> have to worry about overloading vs. specialization vs.  constraints,
> or types vs. aliases...

Templates are stencils for generating code. There's nothing confusing
about that, unless you try to shoehorn them into a preconceived mental
model of functions that take parameters and return something.

Granted, proper tutorials need to be written and put in a prominent
place so that newbies start on the right footing.


> 2. Tuples (I'm referring to both tuple() and TypeTuple()) are very
> confusing if you don't happen to suddenly "get" them.

Again, the problem is lack of proper introductory documentation for
them. Actually, I find that to be a consistent problem with much of the
current D docs. They appear to be written for people who already know
what the thing is, and as such is very unhelpful to a newbie.


> 3. Ranges aren't confusing, but USING them certainly is.
> 
>    Don't believe me?
> 
>    Consider: In C#, you say Array.BinarySearch(arr) to search an
> array.
>    It's VERY straightforward.
>    In D, it's VERY CONFUSING -- there *is* no way to do this
> directly!
>    Which led me to ask this question:
>    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4622377
>    and the solution indeed was NOT something I would've found by
> myself
>    without spending hours on it (which I already had partially
> done).

Again, this is due to poor (or lack of) introductory docs. Really,
things like Ali's excellent D book need to be put in a prominent place
on dlang.org, rather than relegated to a secondary source. Most of the
stuff on dlang.org is written as reference material rather than tutorial
material. It does serve its purpose -- it's there for reference when you
need to look something up. But it's very unhelpful for someone trying to
get started with the language.


> 4. is(typeof(foo) U) is very confusing; it's completely unintuitive
> 
> 5. For that matter, is() is completely unintuitive

is() syntax is a horrible mess. Walter has said that he'd like to
redesign it eventually... but it's not going to happen in the near
future because it's a breaking change.


> 6. The 'in' operator returns a pointer (instead of a boolean). Which
> is fine, except that it's not what you'd expect in any languages
> other than C/C++. i.e. Non-intuitive

Actually, that is a WAT even for somebody coming from C/C++.


> 7. __traits() are confusing
[...]

But they are advanced stuff that you generally don't need until you're
familiar with the language. I don't see this as a problem.


T

-- 
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