Exploring the philosophy of objects

[forkit]

On Sunday, 26 June 2022 at 07:37:01 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
>
> D is trying to position itself as a language where you start 
> with a prototype and evolve it into a product.

D, by design, defaults to 'flexibilty' (as Andrei Alexandrescu 
says in his book - The D Programming Language.

I don't think it's unreasonable, for me to assert, that 
flexibiltiy does not exactly encourage 'structured design'.

But for a language where you want to 'just write code' (which 
seems what most D users just want to do), then D's default makes 
complete sense.

2 examples:

If @safe were default, it would make it harder for people to 
'just write code'.

If private were private to the class, instead of private to the 
module, it would make it harder for people to 'just write code'.

I'm not against the defaults, necessariy. Valid arguments can be 
made from different perspectives.

I much prefer to focus on advocating for choice, rather than 
focusing on advocating for defaults.

But in the year 2022, these defaults don't make sense any more - 
unless as stated, your aim is 'to just write code'.

I think this is what D is grappling with at the moment.

To do structured design in D, you have to make the conscious 
'effort', to not accept the defaults.

btw. Here's a great talk on 'A philosophy of software design', by 
John Ousterhout, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford 
University.

The talk is more or less based on the question he asks the 
audience at the start of this talk.

Having not studied computer science (I did psychology), I was 
surprised when he mentioned 'we just don't teach this' :-(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY