Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 08:57:35PM +0200, pjmp wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 August 2013 at 14:35:19 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 11:19:27AM +0200, Chris wrote:
[...]
> >>One thing that is usually not mentioned in articles about D is that
> >>you don't need an IDE to develop in D. This was, if I remember it
> >>correctly, one of the design goals.
> >
> >Was it a design goal? If so, kudos to Walter. :) Because one of my
> >criteria for a better programming language when I decided that I was
> >fed up with C++ and needed something better, was that it must not
> >have undue reliance on an IDE or some other external tool to be
> >usable. Thus, Java was disqualified (too much boilerplate that can't
> >be adequately handled without an IDE -- of course, there were other
> >factors, but this was a big one). It must be usable with just a text
> >editor and a compiler. D fit that criterion rather nicely. :)
> >
> >
> >T
> 
> Programming like the 70's, yo!  :)
[...]

LOL... to be honest, my PC "desktop" is more like a glorified terminal
shell than anything else, in spite of the fact that I'm running under
X11. My window manager is ratpoison, which is completely keyboard-based
(hence the name), maximizes all windows by default (no tiling /
overlapping), and has no window decorations. I don't even use the mouse
except when using the browser or selecting text for cut/paste. (And if I
had my way, I'd write a keyboard-only graphical browser that didn't
depend on the mouse. I'd use Elinks instead, except that viewing images
in a text terminal is rather a hassle, and there *is* a place for
graphics when you need to present non-textual information -- I just
don't think it's necessary when I'm dealing mostly with text anyway.)

I experimented with various ratpoison setups, and found that the most
comfortable way was to increase my terminal font size so that it's
approximately 80 columns wide (70's style ftw :-P), and however tall it
is to fill the screen. I found that I'm most productive this way --
thanks to Vim's split-screen features and bash's backgrounding features,
I find that I can do most of my work in a single terminal or two, and
another background window for the browser. Since I don't even need to
move my right hand to/from the mouse, I can get things done *fast*
without needing a 6GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM -- a Pentium would suffice
if I hadn't needed to work with CPU-intensive processes like povray
renders or brute-force state space search algorithms. :)

OTOH, I find that my productivity drops dramatically when I'm confronted
with a GUI. I honestly cannot stand working on Windows because of this.
*Everything* depends on the mouse and traversing endless layers of
nested menus just to do something simple, and almost nothing is
scriptable unless specifically designed for it (which usually suffers
from many limitations in how you can use it between different
applications). Give me the Unix command-line any day, thank you very
much.

So yes, I'm truly a relic from the 70's. ;-)


T

-- 
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