A Perspective on D from game industry

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:16:22AM +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 17 June 2014 at 09:17:21 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> >I think you're hitting on the fundamental limitations of automated
> >code-updating tools here: They can't be treated as trusted
> >black-boxes.
> 
> I don't think this is a fundamental limitation of tools, but a
> consequence of language design.
> 
> I also think that features that makes it difficult to write programs
> that analyze the semantics also makes it difficult for humans to
> understand the code and verify the correctness of the code.
> 
> Programming languages are in general still quite primitive (not
> specific to D), they still rely on convention rather than formalisms.
> 
> Semaphores and macro-like features are pretty good examples where
> convention has been more convenient than supporting machine reasoning,
> but it has consequences when we demand better tooling, smarter
> compilers and faster code!
> 
> Semaphores cannot be turned into transactional memory code paths…
> Macro like features prevent high level transforms and optimizations,
> source code restructuring/refactoring etc.

I think you are underestimating the complexity of programming. Automated
tools can only go so far -- ultimately, human intervention is needed for
certain code transformations, and perhaps even that can only go so far,
because programming is inherently complex! Turing-complete languages
exhibit unsolvable problems like the halting problem (that even humans
can't solve), besides also exhibiting intermediate intractible
complexities like non-primitive-recursive functionality and the
expression of NP-complete problems that are inherently irreducible to
simpler constructs.

Granted, 90% of application code these days are nothing but trivial
variations on trivial computational tasks, like sorting, shuffling data
around, etc.. So this part is easily automatable. But I think you're
deceiving yourself if you think that automation is possible beyond the
trivialities of programming.


T

-- 
If it tastes good, it's probably bad for you.