Kotlin Meta and CT programming vs D

[Dom DiSc]

On Wednesday, 25 December 2024 at 01:45:18 UTC, Jo Blow wrote:
> I think the real problem is that we've been building on systems 
> that were build on very primitive ideas and so it's a 
> constantly piling on of ad-hoc changes that may or may not 
> evolve into something more and then a constant need to maintain 
> them.

Yes. That's how evolution works.

> Ideally if, say, we could just create a new system from the 
> ground up(including hardware) with all the "learned lessons" we 
> would get systems that would be far more efficient and 
> "complex". It is because we can, as a species, handle the 
> complexity more. But what we really have is having to work with 
> essentially a primitive system with many layers upon layers of 
> improvements to give it the features and expressiveness we 
> really want from realizing there are better ways.

But I think this is unavoidable.
Take a look at the human genom, it contains everything from frogs 
and fish to apes until the "higher" functions like consciousness 
are build upon them. Evolution never invents everything new from 
scratch but only applies small changes and test if they survive.

> The issue is that the cost to truly start fresh is too much to 
> go back and "do things right" with the lessons learned. So we 
> are stuck with the flaws of the past that has become part of 
> our "DNA". [This is true of all things because it is evolution 
> at work]

It's not only the cost to start new from scratch, it's the 
problem that everything has to become battle-tested again, which 
takes ages.
This is why things like printf are still in use.