food for thought - swift 5 released - bottom types, string interpolation, and stuff.

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:04:07 UTC, Julian wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 06:14:05 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> (Abscissa) wrote:
>> Parson me here, but: Bullshit.
> ...
>> But here's the problem: That's your superpower. It's enviable, 
>> it's impressive,
> ...
>> In short: I...know...low-level. Period.
>>
>> And yet, even *I* look at "x & 1" or "x % 2", and my first 
>> instinct is..."WTF is going on...?
>
> This is some incredibly strident language to deploy in favor of
> isOdd/isEven. Is isOdd actually Julius Caesar? Is this speech
> directed at Brutus? After this kind of talk, it would be an
> embarrassment if the other party said "OK, actually I agree."
> The crowd expects a ritual suicide.

I'm more in the Walter and Andrei camp here, but I could see that 
in a different context isOdd would be a useful contribution to 
the standard library.

When people have strong emotional reactions to technical 
questions then quite often it's an indication that it's a 
question of values that has a technical expression.

 From a narrowly technical perspective there's no way to decide I 
think - it's not like one choice strictly dominates another.  So 
you have to make a choice based on what's most important to you, 
and that's what values are about.

I think for me and in my commercial context it's the values that 
are the most appealing aspect of D, with the technical aspects of 
D as it stands today being an expression of those.

For example making D accessible to people who are put off by 
discomfort - it's not like anyone here thinks yes the user must 
suffer.  It's just that some other things are much more important 
to the leadership and community and choices are made accordingly.

It's a terrible idea to try to be all things to all people, and a 
much better idea to be the thing that you uniquely are destined 
to be.  Because the world is quite large these days and having an 
inordinately high appeal to part of the population is a better 
position to be in than being moderately appealing to everyone.

An inordinate love of comfort is the civilisation-killer and it's 
not great for an enterprise either.  There's a growing movement 
to embrace discomfort and they might just have something.