Improve D's syntax to make it more python like

[Rikki Cattermole]

On Tuesday, 25 March 2014 at 10:28:51 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 3/24/2014 6:49 PM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
> <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
>> On Monday, 24 March 2014 at 22:23:50 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
>> wrote:
>>> Using the same language on client/server is indeed quite 
>>> nice, partly
>>> because of less mental context-switching, and also because of
>>> increased code sharing (which also makes it easier to move 
>>> things
>>> between client vs server if you need to).
>>
>> Yes, especially for data models. It is always annoying to 
>> modify several
>> different layers just to add some fields to a database entry. 
>> Not a big
>> deal, but so… pointless.
>>
>
> Yea, common data models was a very big use of shared 
> server/client code for me, too.
>
>>> using Haxe pretty heavily for a good while. Haxe is a rather 
>>> "ok"
>>> language, which is practically high praise coming from me - 
>>> I'm
>>> typically very critical of languages.
>>
>> I've looked at Haxe from time to time, and I like the 
>> approach, but it
>> has never been sufficient to solve any issues in any real code 
>> I've
>> worked on.
>>
>
> For me, the killer features were:
>
> - As mentioned already, shared server/client code.
>
> - Being able to run code on any commodity PHP servers I was 
> required to support, without having to actually *write* any PHP.
>
> - (Note this was several years ago:) Being able to generate 
> Flash applets without having to actually use any of Adobe's 
> horrible toolchain.
>
> - The language itself *didn't* totally piss me off. ;)
>
> So yea, the Haxe language itself wasn't really a key thing for 
> me, just what it allowed me to *avoid* doing. But even those 
> reasons are loosing their bite for me now, since Flash has 
> pretty much become legacy, vibe.d has appeared, and I'd just as 
> soon avoid the entire PHP runtime as a whole.
>
>> Yeah, that's where I am at now too. So currently I deal with 
>> Python,
>> Dart (working hard to get rid of Javascript) and C++ (and 
>> dabble with
>> XSLT, Java and Objective-C). But I'd rather use something more 
>> clean and
>> strongly typed like Go and D, but with Pythonesque terseness 
>> and
>> functional style list processing hight level cleaness. 
>> Unfortunately
>> both D and Go lack production level support. And even with 
>> production
>> level support they still lack production quality libraries for 
>> excel
>> handling, pdf generation etc.
>
> Heh, I guess that's where we differ ;) I'm...not exactly a big 
> Python fan, and I find D totally production-ready. I generally 
> avoid client-side JS - when I do use it, it's just a 
> sprinkling. If I need to do anything else Flash-like in the 
> future, I'm looking more at Unity3D (esp. the v5 on the horizon 
> with asm.js support) rather than doing HTML5 directly or via 
> things like Dart or CoffeScript.

In semi related news, have you guys seen Cmsed? Built into the 
data model registration is generation of javascript models which 
tie into the restful routing to give you (if I finished it) the 
same level of interaction with the database as you would in D. 
And yes you're in control of the security of each data model for 
each operation type.
I just think thats a neat little feature.