D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

[Mehrdad]

On Friday, 11 May 2012 at 18:16:02 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen 
wrote:
> On 11-05-2012 20:05, Mehrdad wrote:
>> 1. "templates": they seem to take in just about anything, and 
>> return just about anything. They can be pretty confusing, 
>> especially when youhave to worry about overloading vs. 
>> specialization vs. constraints, or types vs. aliases...
>
> Right, D's template system is definitely inspired by C++, no 
> argument there. But in the vast majority of code, you really 
> don't have to use templates for everything.

Not sure I agree.

Templates are almost *impossible* to ignore when working with 
ranges.

>> 2. Tuples (I'm referring to both tuple() and TypeTuple()) are 
>> very confusing if you don't happen to suddenly "get" them.
> I don't know about that. They seemed simple enough to me.

Me too, as a matter of fact.

But they definitely aren't intuitive (just judge by the number of 
questions about them that pop up on StackOverflow or elsewhere...)

>> 3. Ranges aren't confusing, but USING them certainly is.>
> On the contrary, I actually think we're lacking proper 
> documentation on what ranges are.

Yeah probably.

>> Consider: In C#, you say Array.BinarySearch(arr) to search an 
>> array.
>> It's VERY straightforward.
>> In D, it's VERY CONFUSING
> Library issue.

Yeah, you got me there...
But in practice it doesn't make a difference what the cause is, 
so much as what the effect is...


>> 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
> I've always found it very intuitive actually... and it saves me 
> from having to write extra code to do the actual lookup (speed 
> isn't even the point here, I just want concise code).

Yes, I agree, but consider that D users should NOT have to work 
with pointers to do something so basic, like testing to see if 
something is in an associative array!

The mere fact that it uses a pointer makes it unintuitive to a 
large number of people coming from C#/Java/Python/etc.


> But again, most code really won't be doing all that much 
> low-level metaprogramming.

That's the hope, but I keep on finding myself putting 
__traits(compiles, ...) on template conditions and such...