DConf 2013 keynote

[Flamaros]

On Saturday, 11 May 2013 at 02:01:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 02:41:59AM +0200, Flamaros wrote:
> [...]
>> More I work with D, less I want to work with C++.
>
> Yup. I think that applies to a lot of us here. :)
>
>
>> Using D is just as funny as I found Java, but with a greater
>> potential and global control of what we do. A lot of things 
>> are just
>> as simple as they need and can be.
>
> I don't know about you, but I find that Java can be very 
> straitjacketed
> and verbose sometimes. I mean...
>
> 	// Java
> 	class MyLameProgram {
> 		public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
> 		{ ... }
> 	}
>
> Really?!  In D, we just write:
>
> 	// D
> 	void main(string[] args) { ... }
>
> And then:
>
> 	// Java
> 	BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new 
> FileReader(args[0]));
> 	System.out.println("Hello world!");
>
> Seriously?  In D we just write:
>
> 	// D
> 	auto lines = stdin.byLine();
> 	writeln("Hello world!");
>
> Talk about signal-to-noise ratio.
>
> And don't get me started on all those 
> BlahBlahBlahClassWrapper's and
> BlahBlahBlahClassWrapperFactoryWrapper's. Ugh. And Integer vs. 
> int, and
> other such atrocities. What, built-in atomic types are 
> defective so we
> need to wrap them in classes now? Flawed language design, 
> anybody?
>
> I find D superior to Java in just about every possible way. 
> Except
> perhaps for the GC. *That* one needs a bit of work to get us up 
> to
> standard. :-P
>
>
>> Sometimes C++ give me hives, it's so error prone and an
>> under-productive language for the actual industry needs, that
>> certainly why Google created the Go.
>
> Surprisingly enough, before I found D, I actually considered 
> ditching
> C++ for C. I only stayed with C++ because it has certain 
> niceties, like
> exceptions, (and no need to keep typing 'struct' everywhere on 
> a type
> that's blatantly obviously a struct) that in C is a royal pain 
> in the
> neck. C++ is just over-complex, and its complexity in different 
> areas
> interact badly with each other, making it an utter nightmare to 
> work
> with beyond trivial textbook examples. OO programming in C++ is 
> so
> nasty, it's laughable -- if I wanted OO, Java would be far 
> superior. I
> found that C++ is only tolerable when I use it as "C with 
> classes". Its
> OO features suck.
>
> At my day job, we actually migrated from C++ back to C, because 
> the
> person (people?) who wrote the original C++ framework 
> overengineered the
> whole thing, to the point that making a single function call 
> involves up
> to 6 layers of abstraction (in one case involving fread and 
> fwrite of
> function parameters, and *then* serialization/deserialization 
> across an
> RPC link). Eventually 80% of that elaborate framework was never 
> used,
> because the guy who wrote it left the project, and nobody else
> understood it. Everyone just hacked their way around it, 
> resulting an a
> gigantic mess that had who knows how many bugs just lurking 
> beneath the
> surface, waiting to be exposed by a completely unrelated change
> elsewhere in the code. (There were some *dtors* that were doing 
> useful
> work and had side-effects... talk about OO gone wrong.)
>
> We were so traumatized by the experience that the team lead put 
> his foot
> down and said, "no more C++, we're going back to C". My 
> then-supervisor
> had perhaps one of the happiest days of his employment here
> mass-deleting all the subdirectories containing the C++ code, 
> after the
> new C-based infrastructure was ready for use. (My only regret 
> was that
> there are still modules written in C++ lying around.  They 
> still suffer
> from the same issues, albeit to a smaller scale. At least the 
> pain is
> below the tolerable threshold now.)
>
> Of course, C has own its share of nasty gotchas and pain, but, 
> believe
> it or not, it's actually better than our experience of C++, in 
> spite of
> C++ being supposedly the successor to C. If I only had a say in 
> these
> things, I would switch to D in an instant, no questions asked. 
> Sigh. D
> may still have its wrinkles to be worked out, but it's far, far 
> superior
> in comparison.
>
>
>> We border probably unconscious when we use the C + + for 
>> certain
>> uses. I am curious to know which languages Google uses for 
>> their car
>> without a driver.
>
> If the automated car is running on C++ code, I'd be very, very 
> careful
> *not* to own one. Or, if I had to, I'd willingly shell out a 
> fortune for
> my life insurance. :-P (Hey, I might even consider becoming an 
> insurance
> agent, it'd be good money!) ;-)
>
>
> T

I work something like 6 month with Java on a Web server, and the 
pair with Eclipse is nice. Having tools like Unitests well 
integrated or auto-fix suggestion is really great, but that true 
Java just can't leave with a good IDE to generate verbose code. 
Java is also provide with a great Framework and majority of 
libraries are well licensed that help a lot to be productive.

Personally I can't be ok with a language that put performances on 
the side, and never allow to access the hardware, but before D a 
choice had to be done on which language is better for our future 
project.

For me D joins best of two worlds : productivity and 
effectiveness. This without any other tool than the compiler.