Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Ramon]

First, thanks all for returning (or keeping up) a constructive 
discussion.

@monarch_dodra

My error, sorry. I was talking in the context of a western view, 
ignoring China, Japan, Koreas (and probably some more Asian 
countries/languages, too). Not meaning to propagate that as 
generally sound practice, I personally happen to work in a very 
western-centric world where, say, Russian (kyrillic alphabet) is 
already considered *very* exotic. In that context, however, 
16bits are plenty enough.


@H. S. Teoh

I remember myself to stubbornly refuse Windows and staying with 
Dos or Unix (cli). Well, work forced me to make compromises and 
since FreeBSD came up (and Solaris worked on X86) I made one step 
and another ... and are (by your standards) pretty rotten 
nowadays *g

I got your point and I agree. Yes, it's a major plus for D to be 
cli useable and not requiring a (probably bloated) IDE. OTOH, I'm 
quite liberal in that and never had qualms about using an IDE 
(or, in old days, E, brief and the like); after all, a computers 
raison d'etre is to make our lifes easier and to take on a 
gazillion of boring little tasks, no?
But it's, of course, strongly desirable to have "direct access" 
on the commandline, which IMO is valid for other areas, too. 
Actually it always was oe of my reasons to outright hate Windows 
for keeping me away from its guts.


@Timon Gehr

> Here I'd tend to disagree. Code duplication is the compiler's 
> job.
I get your point but I disagree. Sure, looking at it from D's 
point of view (with very powerful and elaborate "duplication" 
facilities) you are right. I see that, however, as a (valuable) 
add-on. It doesn't change the fact that the technical part of 
code production is an editors job; just think code completion, 
intellisense and the like.
Maybe it's just a perspective thing. I tend to feel that the 
editor is the interface between the system and myself. What is 
produced with it will then be the input to a compiler.
Anyway, that's not important because thanks to D's facilities we 
can actually have it both ways ;)

As for generics: Maybe I'm not the brightest guy around but I 
have suceeded in noticing that there seems to be tendency in D's 
community to not react warmly to critical remarks regarding 
generics ...
Actually, I'm far away from hitting on D. Even if, suppose, its 
generics were lousy, there would still be lots of solid good 
reasons to like D and to consider it one of the best approaches 
wide and far. It might as well be my fault to be stubbornly fixed 
on "generics done right".