About the Expressiveness of D

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 04/02/2013 09:59 AM, Jonas Drewsen wrote:
> Article about the expressiveness of languages with D included as one of the
> contestants.

Personal feeling here -- there's a difference between how expressive a language
can be (even, how expressive it can _easily_ be) versus how expressively
programmers tend to use it.

I think my own use of D tends to be heavily biased by my background in C/C++ and
my lack of training in more expressively-focused development styles.  D allows
me to write in those paradigms I feel comfortable with -- and so my use of it is
almost certainly less expressive than it could be.

That feeling is supported by how wide D's error bars are in those plots -- that
diversity may well reflect the number of styles of programming one can adopt
within the language.  I'm surprised that the extreme lower values for the
statistic still seem high relative to other languages, but that in turn might
reflect the state of development of the language, with new features being added
fairly regularly to the standard library (probably larger commits).

I also have a strong feeling that LOC per commit reflects too many different
factors to be really reliable as a comparison, e.g. it probably depends quite
strongly on the age/maturity of a project, the rate of development, and other
factors.

Reading some later posts on the same blog, the author acknowledges some of these
kinds of complications:
http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/26/what-does-expressiveness-via-loc-per-commit-measure-in-practice/