I hate new DUB config format

Sönke Ludwig via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Nov 26 11:05:45 PST 2015


Am 26.11.2015 um 18:10 schrieb Walter Bright:
> On 11/26/2015 12:50 AM, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
>> Nobody has invented anything here. Please at least get your facts
>> straight
>> before ending discussions in this tone and manner.
>
> I told Andrei it was invented, so I take the blame for that. I was
> wrong. Jonathan has since corrected me.
>

Sorry, I had not read the whole thread at that time, so I missed that. 
But still this thread has overall been very irritating to me (that 
doesn't quite describe it). Maybe I should better have replied 
immediately and anticipate some of the statements that followed, but I 
have discussed this topic countless times and I'm getting seriously 
tired of it (because it is the _prototype of a bikeshedding topic_). 
Combine that with a hardly motivated and inflammatory initial post, I 
was hoping that this would just quickly die off - obviously a very naive 
thought.

Just to mention one additional reason for choosing SDLang over one of 
the more popular formats that shared some of the advantages, there is an 
idea to add limited support for (declarative) procedural statements: 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dub/wiki/DEP4#synopsis
The representation possible with SDLang is not as good as in an actual 
programming language, but far better than with any of the JSON-like 
languages.

Otherwise, the language syntax is also quite a natural fit for a 
curly-brace based language. And its simplicity basically renders the 
"learn" argument moot - what you really have to learn is the set of 
directives that DUB recognizes.

Overall, I don't think the popularity argument actually has much weight, 
but there are indeed a lot of arguments for a better format in general. 
BTW, around 20 of the packages registered on code.dlang.org since the 
release of the 0.9.24 version have SDLang based package descriptions 
(about 50%). I haven't checked the already existing packages.


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