Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

[Walter Bright]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> But, you said you didn't wish to mix functional and imperative 
>> programming? I don't understand.
> 
> Not in the same language.  One reason being the impact it will have on 
> managing projects in D.  C++, for example, supports a sufficiently 
> diverse set of programming methodologies that large projects in it tend 
> to be a mess.

I agree that diverse paradigm support can lead to a mess. On the other 
hand, to be a mainstream language I think one must support diverse 
paradigms because programmers are diverse. Additionally, nobody really 
knows yet which horse is the right one to back for multicore 
programming, but functional certainly is a favorite.

I disagree that using multiple languages for one project is a good idea, 
unless one language is hosted by the other (like emacs/elisp). Trying to 
get two languages produced by different vendors to consistently work 
together across platforms and differing upgrade schedules can be a 
prescription for a lot of extra work. Is learning two different 
languages really easier than learning two different paradigms in the 
same language?


> Regarding the D mixed functional / imperative approach, another issue I 
> have with it is that it's exactly the reverse of the Erlang / C model. 
> While Erlang / C is functional for control structures and imperative for 
> optimization points, D looks like it will be imperative for control and 
> functional for optimization.  Plus, I really like the concurrency model 
> in Erlang.

A side note: Everyone complains about feature bloat in Microsoft Word. 
What the world needs is a lean, mean word processor. But the problem is, 
customer Bill says: "That's great, but I need feature #543. Not having 
it is a deal breaker for me." Customer Sue says: "I'd buy the lean & 
mean one, but I need feature #1678. Everything I do is based on that." 
And so on. Feature creep is the result of inexorable and unrelenting 
pressure for them.