Is D painted into a corner?

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Friday, 29 August 2025 at 02:48:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 01:52:59AM +0000, Lance Bachmeier via 
> Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
>> On Thursday, 28 August 2025 at 18:47:19 UTC, Brother Bill 
>> wrote:
>> > It seems like 'templates' are the 'Achilles heel' of D.
>> > 
>> > Without starting a flame war, has D gotten to the point 
>> > where ordinary mortals have difficulty coding in D with 
>> > 'templates' such as 'cycle' requiring rewrites into 
>> > 'myCycle'?
>> 
>> Templates are in general a horrible way to program. Therefore 
>> I don't use them very much. When I do, I don't do anything 
>> complicated. But everyone has their opinion on that. I 
>> similarly don't use attributes. I prefer simple code with a 
>> simple language. Hard to avoid ranges in Phobos, which can be 
>> crazy complex/inconvenient at times, but every language has 
>> its warts.
> [...]
>
> Interesting how opinions differ on this. :-D  I couldn't live 
> without templates.  I might be tempted to quit D if I couldn't 
> use templates... ;-) but OTOH there are times when templates 
> are overused where they aren't actually needed.

Templates are obviously useful in a lot of cases, but I don't 
consider them fun to read.

Another thing I don't like is that functions like foo(T)(T x) 
throw away relevant information. Then you decide to use a 
template constraint, you read the code, and you realize it's 
better to write out stubs for the relevant argument types instead.

Classic D code includes types like Matrix!double when you could 
just use DoubleMatrix.

They're like macros in Lisp. Powerful in principle but routinely 
a PITA when you actually use them. Now, if someone's coming from 
C++, the story is different because templates are just how you do 
it when you're writing C++. He who writes the most generic code 
is the king in that world.