Rust and D

[Jesse Phillips]

On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 17:03:33 UTC, Peter Alexander 
wrote:
>  I'm sure most people here have seen similar arguments against 
> D.

The complaint I've seen in a similar vain have been, "D is too 
complex" "it has everything and the kitchen sink" "if someone 
asks for it, it gets added"

And all but the last one is true. These are valid concerns and 
should not be dismissed as "people complaining to complain." 
Attempts to explain that to simplify the language introduces 
complexity to the code may fail. But the concern is not any less 
valid.

What is more annoying is that the level of understanding the 
complexity is usually attributed to that of C++. I grasp meta 
programming to a fairly decent degree, but I fail to read and 
understand that demonstrated in C++. I have very limited 
experience with C++ and almost no familiarity with templates 
(outside of the overlap with D). The syntax makes a huge 
difference! And with such clean syntax I guess our semantics is 
cleaner too.

A similar parallel I may have identified is Go return values. 
These are compared to those used in C. But if I picked up on this 
correctly, errors codes must be explicitly ignored. In which case 
I think of checked exceptions, except now every call is made with 
a try.

As you can see I am trying to apply experience I have with other 
languages to conform an understanding of the experience I'd get 
from Go. It doesn't mean it will be exactly correct, but this is 
how we efficiently eventuate things. If I have only ridden roller 
coasters that go upside-down, if asked whether I would enjoy one 
that doesn't go upside-down, I can apply my knowledge of the time 
spent not being upside down for those that do and make a best 
guess if I would find it fun/scary.