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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