Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

John Colvin john.loughran.colvin at gmail.com
Tue Aug 20 16:33:34 PDT 2013


On Tuesday, 20 August 2013 at 19:41:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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

I think you might enjoy https://github.com/conformal/xombrero/

snapshots here: 
https://opensource.conformal.com/snapshots/xombrero/ although 
they're a month or so old and I had to edit the URL to get 
there... They clearly don't want any noobs haha

I just built from source and it works very nicely, very 
minimalist.


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