Improve D's syntax to make it more python like

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 15:10 +0000, Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?=
@puremagic.com wrote:
[…]
> Well, I don't know, Dart is in the same vein as CoffeeScript. 
> Dart is compiling to Javascript and Angular Dart is gaining quite 
> a bit of interest even before being ready for production. 
> AngularJS is already quite popular, and more messy than the Dart 
> version. There is a clear upgrade path from JS->Dart. Dart VM 
> will most likely be integrated in Chrome by the end of the year 
> and that probably will have an effect on adoption rate. But, the 
> Dart semantics are significantly better than 
> ECMAScript/Javascript. Probably more so than CoffeeScript.
[…]

I am currently ambivalent about Dart. Node.js has shown that many people
like "end to end" the same language. Many are asking about server-side
Dart as well as client-side Dart in the browser.

Another player in this game is Ceylon which has the explicit aim of
being the "end to end" language compiling to JVM or JavaScript for
server side and JavaScript for client side. I'm not sure how they play
the HTML5 (AngularJS, Ember.js, Backbone.js, jQuery, etc) game. But I
have stopped following all that recently for various reasons.

> I think a python-like syntax in combination with an interpreter 
> like environment (in the vain of ipython) could be more suitable 
> for a particular workflow than the c-like syntax. A strongly 
> typed, terse and readable language with a good dev environment 
> could be a real killer.
> 
> Prototype in the REPL/interpreter and paste into your editor is 
> an attractive development proposition.

IPython is an excellent tool for creating documents that incorporate
executable Python as an integral component. It is "literate Python
programming". However it is only a good tool if the end result is a
document to be read and shared. I think the Python IDE such as Wing IDE,
PyCharm, actually do the REPL and editor model better. But as the saying
goes YMMV.


-- 
Russel.
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