Project Elvis

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 30 October 2017 at 22:42:48 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> However, I'm sure that it's true that a number of the design 
> decisions in D stem from the fact that both Walter and Andrei 
> come from C/C++, and so they're going to tend to make design 
> decisions similar to C/C++ by default. So, D ends up being 
> different when there's a feature that's being purposefully 
> designed to be different from C/C++, but it tends to be similar 
> when there wasn't a strong reason to do something differently 
> from C/C++.

But as we can see from this discussion of the elvis-operator 
those "rough edges" becomes viral over time as you add more 
features. So, whiley some rough edges might not be so visible 
when you have few features, they might be amplified as you add 
more features.  C++ is a pretty good example of this. They add 
new stuff that tries to iron out some of the rough spots, and are 
fairly successful at it, but they have to do it in ways where 
they end up with features clashing or syntactical annoyances. I 
haven't used Rust much, but it is interesting that they managed 
to stay out of the C-mold. Most other main-stream compiled 
languages has not.

Anyway, it often takes several years of practice to discover that 
neat features aren't so good after all. I probably wrote much 
more terse C code in the beginning. I also have changed my ways 
with C++, too much sigils so now I am using "and" and "or" for 
booleans. Too much reuse of "&&" and "&" makes code less 
readable. As languages get more complex feature-wise I think it 
becomes ever more important to streamline. Which is kinda the 
opposite of what happens when you let the design over decades. 
(so you have to put more work into streamlining how you write 
code).