D adoption prerequisites

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Scott S. McCoy wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 2008-04-19 at 01:58 +0400, Koroskin Denis wrote:
>> 4) Standardization. Both standard library and language itself.
>> All we have now is Phobos and Tango. None of them are in no way
>> standard.
>> What we have is Implementation. Instead, we need Interfaces,
>> Prototypes and
>> Rationale. The same goes for a language itself.
>> I'll give my detailed view on it in a separate thread.
>> Should be discussed on digitalmars.DTL or a new one
> 
> I totally agree here.
> 
> A standardized general library, is incredibly useful for any proramming
> language.  But great care has to be taken in creating such a thing.
> Since the mistakes end up outliving everyone involved with it's
> inception.

Most such mistakes will not be identifiable until after implementation and
usage has begun (which is my main gripe with the OP) - however,
standardization is important to various degrees.

Standardization is alpha and omega when it comes to definition of what is
needed for software to interconnect, typically data formats and protocols.

Standardization is important for interfaces as they more easily allows for
3rd party plugins.

Standardization is nice to have for API's as it reduce the work load for the
users.

Since standardization only has a relative importance for API's - you tend
not to find all that many standards in that area - as opposed to for
interfaces. The reason is that it is fairly rare, except for possibly the
most basic of functionality, that one API fits them all - and thus
alternatives doing it this way or that way - will always pop up around the
standards available. In programming, standard API's (especially in relation
to standard libraries) mostly only serve to keep the number of external
compile time dependencies down - and even that seems to become less
important these days with the relative ease with which dependencies can be
automatically downloaded (I don't say that D necessarily have this
perfectly honed yet.)

In conclusion, trying to standardize an API is good - but believing that you
will be able to find the perfect one up front is totally unrealistic.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango