D-etractions A real world programmers view on D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-09-04 15:59, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> I have on occasion had the benefit of simply adding a member variable to
> instances of a class when I needed it without having to burden the rest
> of the code with knowing about that variable.  I felt dirty doing it...
>
> But I think you are right -- "fake" static typing does not come close to
> actual static typing.  If I could count all the time I've wasted because
> I mistyped a member variable name, and it "just worked", blissfully
> reading null instead of the variable I've set, it would probably add up
> to days.  Thankfully, netbeans 7 is better at telling me that a variable
> is previously unset or is never used, but it can't be perfect,
> especially with this mess I inherited.  The original author thought
> "modularity" meant importing large pieces of functions from other files,
> which the IDE refuses to correctly interpret.
>
> This, of course, all comes from two guys who really like static typing
> :)  We *may* have a biased view.

I can tell you this, I've wished many times that I had static typing in 
Ruby. I've also wished quite many times I had dynamic typing in D. I 
think optional static typing, like Dart, sounds like a good idea.

I'm currently updating a Rails project to Ruby 1.9 and I really wished I 
had static typing. Just that fact that it won't load file until it's 
actually needed is quite annoying. Finding all the corner cases can be 
quite a lot of work. For example, a partial that is loaded when the 
rendering is triggered by an Ajax request.

> In any case, it is what it is -- the existing code-base is huge, and I
> have no real desire to rewrite all of it :)  The best I can do is add
> some typing comments and hobble through it (cursing as I go).  If I had
> a year of spare time, I could rewrite it all in D!
>
> -Steve


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg