Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

Meta via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Jul 9 21:13:07 PDT 2016


On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 02:44:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 08:39:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Seems that in order to make it useful, users had to extend it. 
>> This doesn't fit the criteria.
>
> Scheme is a simple functional language which is easy to extend. 
> Why would you conflate "useful" with "used for writing complex 
> programs"?
>
> Anyway, there are many other examples, but less known.
>
>> Wirth's Pascal had the same problem. He invented an elegant, 
>> simple, consistent, and useless language. The usable Pascal 
>> systems all had a boatload of dirty, incompatible extensions.
>
> I am not sure if Pascal is elegant, but it most certainly is 
> useful. So I don't think I agree with your definition of 
> "useful".
>
>
>> What programmers think of as "intuitive" is often a collection 
>> of special cases.
>
> I think I would need examples to understand what you mean here.

I agree with Walter here. Scheme is not a language that you can 
generally do useful things in. If you want to do anything 
non-trivial, you switch to Racket (which is not as minimalistic 
and "pure" as Scheme).


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