Article on programming language adoption (x-post from /r/programming)

[Tofu Ninja]

On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:40:31 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 13:21:23 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>> They see more value in unit
>> tests than types, both overall and as a debugging aid. Fur-
>> thermore, how features are presented strongly influences
>> developer feelings about them, such as prioritizing class in-
>> terfaces much higher than static types
>>
>> Stop the world, I want to get out!
>
> "We found that developers gener-
> ally value expressiveness and speed of development over
> language-enforced correctness."
>
> I'll never understand why typing is regarded as such a big 
> effort that slows down development. The terrible yoke of typing!

I don't think its that people think typing is bad, I think its 
that people don't like unnecessary typing, as typing is the main 
interface between us and our program its obvious that we would 
want that interface to be as efficient as possible.

Personally that is why I came to D, because it was easier to be 
more concise in it than in C++, not because of the amazing 
template system or the fast compile time or the safety, I found 
out about them after the fact. I came simply because I thought 
that C++'s syntax was bloated and ugly and that D's syntax was a 
bit cleaner and slimmed down.

Simple example, why would I want to type "node->next" when I 
could just type "node.next". On the surface its only one more 
character but in reality its the difference between pressing one 
key that you are used to pressing in every day typing(the period) 
or the combination of pressing a '-' then holding down the shift 
and pressing the '.' key, its made worse by the fact that the '-' 
and the '.' are so far away from each other.

When every you are trying to optimize for speed you need to 
always be aware of your bottle necks, for streaming video its 
internet speed, for a CUDA application its main memory, for 
coding its they keyboard.