dub: should we make it the de jure package manager for D?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:50:52 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 05:11:38PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> Seriously, this is just like writing assembly code in 1975. Screw up a
> single opcode, and the computer just blindly barges onward
> interpreting random bytes as instructions, wreaking havoc to your
> entire system while you stare at the screen believing that it's still
> computing what you think you told it to. Who knew that JS was an
> underhanded way of getting people to write assembly code by hand
> again? :-P
> 

Exactly. I really do believe that's a very accurate way to put
it.

I don't like the prevailing notion that such dynamic languages have
strong typing. Yes, they *technically* have strong typing, but most
benefits are thrown right out the window. So *in effect* it's mostly
the same as not having strong typing at all - either way you're still
getting tons of seemingly random, unpredictable, barely-tracable, and
*potentially dangerous* behavior any time the slightest thing goes
wrong.

Just because a language has addressed dangerous low-level behaviors
doesn't mean it's addressed dangerous high-level behaviors. All
they've really accomplished is make the same old problems and
catastrophes operate on a higher level than before (but more slowly
and with greater power drain). So like you said: Reliability-wise,
they're just reinventing assembly.

> > Whitespace is only sometimes significant in YAML. On the JSON
> > constructs, it's not significant. On certain (all?) of the non-JSON
> > YAML-specific things, then it's significant.
> 
> Yikes. So whitespace is neither always significant nor always
> insignificant, but *sometimes* significant? Then I have to agree with
> Jonathan that YAML is truly evil!
> 

I don't know about evil. While I don't like indent syntax (it is one of
the things I dislike about Python), YAML does at least make it
*possible* to avoid both the syntax-fiesta of JSON and the anti-DRYness
of XML, and YAML files *can* be constructed to be very easy to read. So
I think that alone means YAML deserves at least *some* respect.

However, the problem I have with YAML is that it's complex, with various
difficult-to-remember syntaxes. I'd feel that I'd have to be very, very
careful when writing, editing or generating YAML. And yea, the
"sometimes significant indenting" is certainly part of that complexity.

Fun fact:
Did you know Python's indenting is only "sometimes significant", too?