[OT] Sharp Regrets: Top 10 Worst C# Features

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 19 August 2015 at 02:08:08 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> #8: ah, the good ole controversial bitshift operators... esp. 
> the still unresolved controversy surrounding the behaviour of
> >> vs. >>> (sorry, forgot the bug number, but it's in
> bugzilla).  IMO, we should ditch these operators and use int 
> intrinsics for the assembly instructions instead. What's the 
> use of built-in operators that are only occasionally used in 
> system code?  Something like 1.shiftLeft(2) would work just 
> fine in expressions, and simplify the lexer by having less 
> token types.
>
> I'm not sure about making a separate type for ints-as-bits, 
> though. That seems a bit extreme, and would almost imply that 
> non-bitarray numbers would have to be BigInt by default.
>

I like this point. I rarely see those operators, but it's usually 
in some kind of highly optimized code that is impossible to 
follow (maybe the compiler uses these more?). Also, every time I 
see a >> I always think much bigger than, which of course doesn't 
make any sense. 1.shiftleft(2) is actually much more intuitive to 
me.

>
> #5: seems like just syntax nitpicking... though in the case of 
> D, the current schizophrenic split between attributes on the 
> left vs. attributes on the right is another example of 
> needlessly convoluted syntax.
>

I agree with both points. Nevertheless, it does seem like a lot 
of newer languages have adopted this style. Rush and Go both have 
the type follow the name of the variable. I could add Julia and 
Python's mypy to that as well. I had downloaded some introduction 
to homotopy type theory, which I did not understand more than a 
few pages of, and it also used the name : type approach, so I 
imagine it is being used more broadly in mathematical type 
theories.

Anyway, I can't imagine this would ever be adopted for D. It 
conflicts with too much stuff, most notably inheritance and 
template specialization, at this point.