Should this work?

[Peter Alexander]

On Saturday, 11 January 2014 at 02:15:15 UTC, Manu wrote:
> That is the world today, that is where the bar is. D will be 
> wildly
> successful on the day that programmers that have never seen it 
> before can
> come along, effortlessly write whatever code they're trying to 
> write,
> offered useful help by the compiler along the way, walk away 
> feeling really
> smart and happy with their experience.

That is not a D I want to be part of.

Let's give a container library to someone that knows nothing of 
containers, they'll say "what's with all these 'red-black trees' 
and 'linked lists'? I just want to store a bunch of numbers!", so 
you streamline the design to one container that does everything 
in O(n) time or better. Much simpler than the user having to 
learn anything, and they can get things done effortlessly and 
feel smart and happy.

Let's get rid of value types and just heap allocate everything in 
the GC and make copies on every write. Much easier than learning 
about object lifetime and mutability.

Let's get rid of static typing and make D dynamically typed. Much 
easier than learning about type systems.

That's what D becomes if users aren't willing to RTFM. There are 
trade-offs in language/library design and D has traded some 
convenience for efficiency. You cannot have the high-performance 
and powerful modelling capabilities of ranges with unbounded 
convenience.

I'm not saying convenience isn't important, but things like 
ranges have subtleties, and need those subtleties to achieve the 
performance/power they were designed for. If you want that, 
you'll need to bite the bullet and learn, if you don't, then just 
go and write Python.

<3