Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?
Chris via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Jul 14 06:26:06 PDT 2016
On Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 12:12:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
> On Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 11:38:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 13 July 2016 at 17:30:53 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>>
>>> Software design is an iterative process because one can't
>>> sort everything at once.
>>
>> Not true. Ola can. :) (I just couldn't resist ...)
>
> I don't have time for a long rant on this...
Now, now. Where's your sense of humor?
> But if you are designing a truly new langauge (and D isn't),
> then you create prototypes, then you build a framework that is
> suitable for evolutionary design, then you spec it, then you
> try to prove it sound, then you implement it then you trash it,
> and redesign it and write a new spec. Once you have a
> foundation where most things can be expressed in libraries you
> have a good base for iterating and handing it to the world.
Such a language will never see the light of day. Never. And given
the constant changes in the IT business, you'll have to
constantly trash and re-implement things. Nobody will be able to
use the language in the real world, and it's using a language in
the real world that shows you where a language's strengths and
weaknesses are. I fear that some of the younger languages are
taking that path. They will be ready for use by the time we'll
have quark based processors or switched to telepathy altogether
:-)
What makes a language attractive is that you can actually use it
- here and now.
> Of course, the first thing you ought to do is to look at
> existing knowhow related to language design.
Which is what D did.
> That's a no-brainer.
>
> The alternative, to just iterate, is what gives you languages
> like Perl and Php.
... which, in fairness, where never meant to be carefully
designed languages. Just convenient hacks for everyday tasks.
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