Hmm - about manifest/enum

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Michiel Helvensteijn wrote:

> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> 
>> If one were to have a "panel" of experienced users, one should strive to
>> have one with equally much experience in the various big languages (too
>> bad that it is hard finding anyone with 10+ years in Java and 5+ in C#).
>> As it is now, the overweight of C++ seems to be too big (from the
>> outside), which sounds doubly bad considering D is touted as a language
>> fixing C++ mistakes. Most C++-users I know refuse to even acknowledge
>> that C++ is bad.
> 
> C++ user here.

Previous user here (may still return for the right contract, but it is
unlikely).

> 
> C++ and Java are both just hopelessly outdated. However, when C++ was new
> it was the best language of its type around. And after many years of use
> it has become extremely stable and reliable. 

This weren't the truth only a few years ago, when any cross platform use
made exceptions and anything but trivial templates banned from the projects
I worked on. If the specification is too difficult to implement in
homogenous way, then I won't call it reliable (although the spec itself is
stable).

> Because it is so popular, it 
> is also impossible to change the meaning of anything as often used as
> enum.

Sure. I accept that there won't be more changes to D 1.0

> 
> I will agree that C++ is not perfect. But it is not bad. If you claim it
> is, I'd like to hear some arguments.

And sure C++ is not the worst thing ever. Overall, I consider it bad. I'm
bad at good argumentation over this, but after I've been using D and Java
(and a very short bout of C#) for some years after I did any serious C++, I
am convinced, deep into my heart, that most details (often just syntactical
stuff! The features are mostly good, and it certainly creates fast
executables) can be improved upon, and often in a major way. D shows this.
C++ is a very big language, bigger yet than D (at least as far as the spec
goes) and almost everything is possible through some (probably)
non-intential way that has become convention and rooted into specification
and/or use-base libraries. The thing here is that those conventions tend to
crop up in the D discussions as good reasons to do those things the same
way in D, and _that_ is what frustrates me. I do _not_ think overloading a
keyword with a new meaning in anyway reduce language bloat (the feature is
still there, even if it don't have a keyword of its own).

> 
> At first I really liked the D specs. The explicit contracts / invariants /
> unittests, the useful template possibilities, the variadic functions, to
> name a few. But right now D seems far too unstable and convoluted for me.
> It's already past version 1, well into 2 and already planning for 3. Not
> so much fixing and stabilizing (or, you know, standardizing) the existing
> language as adding more and more features. I'm glad I have something as
> reliable as C++ to work with.

As has been pointed out, the versioning of D is a bigger problem than
stability itself as it is confusing. 1.0xx is stable, 2.0xx is not (and I
have no idea how the version is meant to look when it becomes stable).

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