Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Russel Winder]

On Fri, 2019-10-18 at 14:01 +0000, Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> Where is no data or conclusive evidence, there are some anecdotes.

But that is the point, they are anecdotes, reports of individual's experience.
Very useful for building theories and hypotheses, but definitely not
conclusive evidence.

> - some people with large python codebases, even full-time, tend 
> to tell me that dynamic types don't "scale" that well past 10 kLOC

And some people have no problem using dynamic types with 10kLOC codebases.

> - some problems reveal themselves "at scale". For example in a 
> C++ constructor you can leave a filed uninitialized. I've once 2 
> weeks on such a bug that cascaded in a complicated system.  D has 
> .init and would have avoided that.

Which is good.

> - Java seems to scale exceptionally well thanks to a culture of 
> reuse and comparably simple language

That there are some very big Java codebases doesn't necessarily support the
thesis that Java supports scaling. That some people have found ways of working
with big codebases is a testament to their ingenuity as much as it is to the
classes and packages. But yes packages definitely help with all languages that
have them – we could posit that as a theory. 

> I don't think it's all in our heads that some language are more 
> conducive to "scale", whatever that means.

If we do not define "scaling" then there can be no statement of "some language
support scaling better than others". We need to be clear what we mean by
scaling in codebases, but I thought we had a common definition of this
already.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

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