Python : Pythonista / Ruby: Rubyist : / D : ?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 22 April 2017 at 17:17:46 UTC, Vasudev Ram wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 April 2017 at 08:30:03 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> On Fri, 2017-04-21 at 17:20 +0000, Vasudev Ram via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> Hi list,
>>> 
>>> I hope the question is self-evident from the message subject. 
>>> If not, it means: what are D developers generally called (to 
>>> indicate that they develop in D)? The question occurred to me 
>>> somehow while browsing some D posts on the forums just now.
>>> 
>>> DLanger? DLangist? D'er? Doer? :)
>>> 
>>> I tend to favor DLanger, FWIW.
>>
>> I would hope none of these, but as ketmar said "programmer".

There is none, probably just D programmer.  Maybe the D community 
isn't big enough yet.

>> Terms such as Pythonista, Rubyist, Rustacean, Gopher, etc. are 
>> terms of tribalism and exclusion. They are attempts to ensure 
>> people claiming membership of the tribe reject being polyglot 
>> by pressuring them to eschew all other languages.
>
> I think you are over-generalizing, and don't fully agree. 
> Definitely, some people may use those terms in that manner and 
> for that reason. Boo to them :)

By definition, you are creating such a term to include some 
people and exclude others.  Often it creates tribes full of 
groupthink, like Russel says, but it doesn't have to, like you 
say.

> I'm never in favor of such pressuring, exclusion or whatever. 
> And BTW I know what I am talking about, having seen some of it 
> in real life, one example being in the Ruby world. I did Ruby 
> commercially for a while, learned it even before Rails was 
> created or became popular. And I frequented the Ruby message 
> boards and blogs for a while, and participated in them. Saw a 
> lot of what you describe, others have written about it too. A 
> good amount ofjuvenile and one-up-manship behavior. That is one 
> reason why I moved to Python (apart from liking it after using 
> it some). The community tended to me more mature and 
> engineering-oriented, rather than like the Ruby people, many of 
> whom were hackish and gloated over having done some cool stuff 
> with Ruby "magic" or monkey-patching (which often results in 
> hard-to-find bugs - cool for experimenting, bad for production 
> use). As far as being polyglot is concerned, I'm quite in favor 
> of that too, and would never dream of even suggesting, let 
> alone pressuring, people to "eschew all other languages", as 
> you put it (this is the point about which I don't agree and 
> think you are over-generalizing). In fact, I do training too, 
> and once, a student who was taking a Python course from me, was 
> talking about his goals (he works in another field and is 
> trying to get into development). As part of that, he mentioned 
> wanting "to become a good programmer (Python)" - at which point 
> I immediately replied to him, that his goal should not be to 
> become a good _Python_ programmer, per se, but to become a good 
> _programmer_, period, because there is much more to programming 
> than one or even many languages - databases, use of libraries, 
> software design, testing, debugging, use of source control and 
> other tools, naming conventions, other programming conventions 
> and style, etc.  Mentioned books like Code Complete to him - as 
> a great resource on those lines.
>
> And I'm a polyglot programmer myself, having worked on BASIC 
> (learnt on home computers), Pascal, C, Java, Informix 4GL. Done 
> real commercial work in all of those, apart from the same in 
> both Ruby and Python. And even keep dabbling in new languages 
> now and then. That's how I came across D, for example, which I 
> like a lot - IIRC it was by reading some article in a computer 
> magazine, could have been Dr. Dobbs.
>
>> A good programmer can work professionally with a number of 
>> languages, the psychology of programming people have data 
>> supporting this theory – if the languages have different 
>> computational models.
>
> Totally agreed.
>
>> Thus I would claim to be a programmer currently working with D 
>> for the project I am working on just now, with SCons/Python 
>> for the build system. In a while it will be C++ on another 
>> project with CMake. Later still it will be C and Meson on a 
>> different project. Further on it will be Kotlin and Frege 
>> using Gradle for yet another project.
>
> Same here. Language agnostic. It's the best way. Another 
> anecdote - once, in a company where I worked and was managing a 
> product team, I had a need to write a small reminder utility 
> for my own use. The project was in C++ and Java (I worked on 
> the Java side), but since I knew Python and it was a good fit 
> for the tool, I did it in Python - in a few minutes. One of my 
> team members wanted to do it too, so, since he only knew Java, 
> when I told him I was doing it in Python and it would be done 
> very fast, he smiled and said "I'll do it in Java" - and 
> proceeded take more time than I did for the same functionality. 
> Nor was there any performance or other requirement that 
> necessitated Java - he did it because it was the only language 
> he knew. "Use the right tool for the job" and all that ...

You're rambling here. :)

We don't have a name for ourselves, it's not a bad question if we 
should.  It's tough to form anything from D alone, another reason 
the short name sucks for a new language.  Of course, C, C# and 
C++ have the same problem. ;)

Maybe we should wait till the community gets larger and see what 
evolves, if anything.