We are forking D

[Walter Bright]

On 1/10/2024 5:38 AM, Max Samukha wrote:
> The appeal to aesthetics doesn't work, either. Aesthetics is highly subjective 
> and depends on the environment.

Aesthetics based on fashion are highly subjective, sure. There are enduring 
things of beauty, too. For example, there are ugly airplanes are beautiful ones. 
The beautiful ones tend to fly better. The lines on a modern airliner are 
beautiful, and none of it is the result of artists.

Speaking as an engineer, there's a consistent correlation between things that 
are beautiful and things that work well. It's visible everywhere - bridges, 
ships, turbines, rockets, even clothing.

Back when I designed electronic circuits, I laid things out so they'd form 
neatly arranged patterns. A break in the pattern suggested a mistake. Students 
who created a circuit that looked like a rat's nest of wires and parts rarely 
got them to work.

So why not programming languages?


> In reality, some of your decisions that limit the language in order to impose 
> your aesthetic preferences on the programmer often result in the most 
> unaesthetic hacks I've ever seen.

That's correct. The idea is to nudge the programmer to find a better way.

For example, version algebra in C is a rich, endless source of bugs and errors, 
on top of being ugly. There are much better ways to do it in C, but it's just 
too easy to create the ugly buggy version.