LinkedIn Article to be: Why you need to start moving off C/C++ to D, now.

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 16 July 2014 at 21:02:42 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 07/16/2014 01:22 PM, Remo wrote:
>> On Monday, 14 July 2014 at 23:43:57 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
>> Digitalmars-d
>> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:22:53PM +0000, John Carter via
>>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> Any other good blog posts / social media comments / pointers 
>>>> I can
>>>> digest and use?
>>>
>>> This one came to mind:
>>>
>>> http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
>>>
>>
>> This is pretty bad promotion for Haskell.
>> The Author of this post apparently do not know C++ well enough
>> or just ignore this knowledge.
>
> That would be somewhat curious.
> http://www.amazon.com/In-Action-Industrial-Programming-Techniques/dp/0201699486
>
> In any case, personal attacks are irrelevant and do not belong 
> here. There are less intrusive ways of formulating this thought.
>
>> Me as a C++ developer who likes Haskell (and D) after reading 
>> this I
>> like C++ a bit more and Haskell a bit less.
>> ...
>
> You are entitled to your opinion, but I'll still point out that 
> taking disagreement with some piece of writing as evidence for 
> the (assumed!) contrary is not a valid way of building a 
> well-reasoned one.
>
>>> It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using 
>>> shared
>>> pointers in particular) is better than garbage collection.
>>
>> And then he pointed to a "A Unified Theory of Garbage 
>> Collection" paper
>> where "reference counting" as a strategy (method) for a Garbage
>> Collection will be disused.
>> This is NOT the same as std::shared_ptr do !
>> ...
>
> This seems a little bit superficial; what would be a _rebuttal_ 
> of his fundamental point?

The funny thing about C++ is that there is a plethora of books 
that teach you how to do it right, which is a sign that there is 
something inherently wrong with the language*. I find that in D 
there aren't many ways to *really* do it wrong, but still you 
have the freedom to try different approaches. D is not overly 
prescriptive, but often keeps you from shooting yourself in the 
foot (or blow away your whole leg**) What can happen in D is that 
you don't use the most efficient way of doing something, it will 
make your program slower, but it won't blow away your legs, arms 
or head, and you can easily fix it later, if needs be.


* And also a sign that there is a huge industry behind it, and, 
of course, people who make a living being C++ gurus don't want 
the language to slowly disappear. C++ reminds me a little bit of 
religion: high priests, mysteries, dogmata ...

** "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it 
harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg."
– Bjarne Stroustrup