D and the world

[eao197]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:40:48 +0400, Don Clugston <dac at nospam.com.au> wrote:

> I don't think we know yet how well either D or Nermele will scale; but  
> my intuition that D will fare better.

I agree with you.

>> AFAIK, Lisp proves that languages with high degree of metaprogramming  
>> don't scale well in that sence. Because every developer tends to invent  
>> his own, more powerful and elegant Lisp  
>> [http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?SocialProblemsOfLisp ;)].
>
> I think Nemerle will suffer from this. IMHO, being able to define 'for'  
> in the language itself, has no benefit in practice; the set of useful  
> control constructs is very well known. If it's useful to everyone, it  
> should be rigidly controlled by the language; otherwise you get  
> confusion and incompatibility.

Implementation of 'for' as macro is just an example. Main constructs are  
already in language and nobody will reimplement it. But macro system in  
Nemerle allows to insert a DSL with different syntax into a program by  
extending core language syntax.

In my opinion that is more a problem that a benefit, especially in  
long-term projects with big or/and highly rotated teams.

But my point was: because of nature of Nemerle it is very hard to compete  
with it in metaprogramming area.

> I suspect that in D, metaprogramming will be used almost exclusively for  
> domain-specific languages.

I agree with you here again.
But it is hard to make any prediction without knowledge of the future D  
macro system.

-- 
Regards,
Yauheni Akhotnikau