Time to destroy Walter: breaking modules into packages

TommiT tommitissari at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 19 20:39:30 PDT 2013


On Wednesday, 19 June 2013 at 22:40:47 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Thursday, June 20, 2013 00:21:45 TommiT wrote:
>> Also, I'm just curious why do you keep saying "we don't want to
>> complicate the package access specifier any further"? Because
>> isn't the current specification of the package access specifier
>> the simplest possible that it could ever be? "Everything under
>> the same folder has access to symbols labeled package". It 
>> takes
>> just 11 words to define it. You're talking about it like it's
>> already somehow complicated.
>
> No, it's not complicated, but the lanugage as a whole is 
> complicated, and any
> new feature that's added to it increases its complexity. As 
> such, it needs to
> pull its weight, and I really don't believe that that's the 
> case here. I just
> don't think that complicating the package access modifier any 
> further is worth
> the gain. There is some gain, but I think that it's ultimately 
> quite small,
> and I'd much prefer that access modifiers stay simple. 
> Obviously, you're
> entitled to think that the extra complexity is worth it, but I 
> don't agree.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

You're willing to add extra complexity and inconvenience to 
programming in D just in order to keep the language specification 
simple. I don't think it's a good trade-off. Learning the complex 
details of language is a one-time cost that all programmers must 
pay when they start with the language. Whereas complexity and 
inconvenience in actually programming with the language is a 
running cost and may be a source of bugs as well. The running 
cost should clearly over-weight the one-time cost here.


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