So You Want To Write Your Own Language
The Old One via Digitalmars-d-announce
digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Thu Dec 24 13:11:34 PST 2015
On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 16:37:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
> On 24/12/15 02:08, Walter Bright wrote:
>> This has resurfaced on Reddit:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xya5v/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language/
>
> In the comments, about the cluttered syntax. For the
> attributes, due to legacy reasons, it seems like D got all the
> defaults wrong. System instead of safe, mutable instead of
> immutable, not pure instead of pure and so on. We might not be
> able to get rid of any attributes but if some of these defaults
> were different perhaps it would not be necessary to use so many
> attributes all the time.
>
> I know that many here don't agree but personally I think the
> language could have less syntax it had AST macros. Some syntax
> that is built-in now could be moved to library code in the form
> of macros.
I agree. As we all know, these choices have much to do with
trying not to disturb all the welcome people from C/C++. But now
that D is becoming a more self-confident language, and a larger
percentage of newcomers to D have other backgrounds than C/C++,
it is becoming increasingly important to have the language "do
the Right Thing" from the outset.
By now the former C/C++ programmer has to learn an entirely new
language, as compared to 5 or especially 10 years ago, when D
could (well, at least sarcastically) be described as just another
Dialect of C.
Today, D is a proud and strong, and not even a new, language, and
the Default choices of system/safe, (im)mutable, (not)safe, etc.,
should be based only on choices that are obvious when we look at
D now and in the foreseeable future. Not on what the past was.
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