Moving back to .NET

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Sep 25 12:07:07 PDT 2015


On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 16:15:45 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 13:54:40 UTC, Chris wrote:
>
>> Having followed this forum for 2 or 3 years now, I doubt 
>> whether an IDE would attract people at this stage. If we had a 
>> full-fledged IDE, there would be other concerns (or excuses). 
>> D scares people away. It's too raw, too bare bones, everything 
>> is still moving like hot lava, and maybe people are 
>> intimidated by it, because they feel they might be considered 
>> bad programmers, if they don't know the ins and outs of it.
>
> This is very insightful, and I think goes to the heart of 
> things.
>  (Based on what I have observed, and my experience with working 
> with someone who had exactly this feeling).

I think there's a good bit of fear involved. I've seen this kind 
of behavior with other things, not just D. Nothing ever suits 
people, nothing will do. It's an excuse based on latent fear.

> I don't think it's true these days that programmers who depend 
> on an IDE and on a visual debugger are mediocre programmers[*], 
> but definitely mediocre programmers are scared of the command 
> line, and it is in the nature of things that there are more 
> mediocre programmers than not, if you have a generous 
> definition of programmer.  And then because there are more of 
> them and we live in a democratic age that also shapes the 
> culture to a certain extent.

Never would I call someone a mediocre programmer _because_ s/he 
uses an IDE. Neither do I think that I'm the cream of the crop, 
because I use D. But an IDE is not everything, actually it's the 
last bit you build, once the language is working. But these days 
it's the other way around, people think IDE means that a given 
language is good. It's just easier to use.


> Do you think it's true that there is no end to D, as far as the 
> language itself goes?  I mean there is no end to C in terms of 
> learning about programming, but that's a different point.  I 
> never even really wrote object-oriented code before a couple of 
> years back, let alone doing metaprogramming (unless you count 
> Forth).  I've still got much to learn, but I don't feel held 
> back by the vast scope of the language or anything.  Mostly if 
> I pick up someone else's source I can figure out what it's 
> doing (some of the template stuff goes slowly).  That's after 
> two years of learning D, and after a long long break from 
> programming.  I'm also 42, which means it starts to become 
> slower to learn then 30 years ago.

D keeps challenging you. That's the point. Java gives you an 
ideology, tells you it's good, it's the best and you follow it. 
They tell you "we guys know, we've tried things, and this is the 
best". No questions asked. In D people got together and said 
"wait a minute ..." It challenges beliefs and ideologies, and 
everyone can contribute and make suggestions. For me it changed 
my whole way of thinking. OOP no longer exists for me. D is 
iconoclastic, and this p*sses people off. You have to rethink all 
the time. Not many people want to do that.

[snip]

Impatience is maybe the D community's biggest drawback.


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