Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Tyler Jameson Little]

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

Haha, I'm the same, except with XMonad. I use tmux to separate 
projects, and I have xmobar running so I can watch CPU and RAM 
explode when I run DMD =D

I've tried using Java, but it just doesn't work in this config. 
Eclipse happens to suck in my WM and javac is terrible to use on 
the CLI for big projects (and I refuse to use Ant...). I stick to 
simple languages that don't need an IDE: D, Go, C, Python, 
Javascript, Rust, and sometimes Haskell.

I would say I'm a relic from the 70's, but I wasn't born until 
the 80s...