Fact checking for my talk

[ZombineDev via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 15 August 2016 at 14:40:14 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Aug 2016 06:43:11 +0000, ZombineDev wrote:
>> Well, I guess it would hard for me to convince you if you 
>> don't know what Design by Introspection means.
>
> Some years ago I was on #d on freenode and someone made a 
> reference to high-order functions. I hadn't encountered the 
> term, so I asked about it. The person answered that if I didn't 
> know what it meant, I must not use high-order functions.
>
> In point of fact I was making moderate use of high-order 
> functions at that time, but I hadn't heard that term for it. 
> There is a difference between knowing how to do a thing and 
> knowing a specific term for that thing.

Sorry, I didn't mean my post to sound that way. From my 
experience of trying to explain DbI to a couple of friends, it's 
a hard to appreciate the paradigm if you're not already using it 
casually, and so it would be even harder for me to make a case 
for why it makes C++ concepts / Rust traits much less useful than 
they're advertised to be.

The classic example would be walkLength [1]. However that example 
does not make a good case because it could also be implemented 
with overloading or dynamic casts (albeit at the cost of 
inflexibility and/or runtime pessimization) in other languages 
like C++ and C#. Personally, I really like things like Seb's 
recent work on attribute propagation for 
std.experimental.allocator.make and makeArray  [2][3][4], but I'm 
not sure if that's an example a beginner would appreciate.

[1]: 
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/blob/v2.071.2-b2/std/range/primitives.d#L1577
[2]: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4680/files
[3]: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4682/files
[4]: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4683/files