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

Tofu Ninja emmons0 at purdue.edu
Thu Aug 1 08:33:53 PDT 2013


On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:12:19 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 15:01:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think they meant typing as in "strong/weak typing"
>
> string text;
> text = "Hello!";
>
> as opposed to
>
> text = "Hello"
> var text = "Hello"
>
> Dynamic typing, although it saves a few keystrokes, can 
> introduce some subtle bugs.
>
> I think D's auto keyword for obvious cases is pretty good.

Now that you said that, you comment makes more sense to me(I was 
wondering why you liked to type so much :/)... I agree with you 
that I don't really see why people make a big deal about it, but 
it can be annoying and repetitive to do something like...

someClassNameThatIsReallyLong x = new 
someClassNameThatIsReallyLong();

But as you said, auto is a good solution to that...

I think it still comes back to my main point from before, the 
redundancy is not necessary. Unnecessary typing = bad in most 
peoples minds.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list