Nim Nuggets: Nim talk at Strange Loop 2021

[Paulo Pinto]

On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 08:15:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 10/16/2021 11:05 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 04:17:38 UTC, jfondren wrote:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VRuZo2pdA
>>>
>>> About 50% of it is inadvertent praise for D. The rest is ARC 
>>> and C++ interop.
>> 
>> If you mean compile time evaluation, D wasn't the first with 
>> such features and it is quite far from what Common Lisp is 
>> capable of.
>
> Lisp is fundamentally different. It started out as an 
> interpreter and later added native code generation. There never 
> really was a difference between compile time and runtime for 
> Lisp.
>
> Nobody even thought of compile time function evaluation for C 
> and C++ until D did it.
>
> Nobody.
>
> As evidence, when people discovered that C++ templates could be 
> used to evaluate things at compile time, everyone was 
> completely agog over it. I never heard *anyone* suggest that 
> maybe ordinary functions could do this, too.
>
> Now everyone does it. Even C is considering adding it.

Maybe you should have read more SIGPLAN papers then, there are 
several examples of those capabilities.

Always screaming D did it before C and C++ is not going to 
increase D's userbase, specially since they get the feature 
without leaving their ecosystem.

Maybe instead of complaining about who did it first, the 
community should focus on fixing all lose ends.