const sucks

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Just got this from Eric Niebler:

http://tinyurl.com/4apat7

Guess what Anders Heljsberg and Guy Steele have to say about future of 
programming languages.

Immutable and eliminating side effects are necessary. Quickly written 
down from Anders: "...we need support for immutable data at the language 
level..." "...so that the compiler can infer that there is isolation..." 
"... formalization of immutability... we don't have them in the language 
and it's nontrivial to put them in... and that's the big challenge." He 
goes on and describes the difficulties... and mentions "pure functions" 
and "transitivity" and "functional extensions"!!! "Pure FP is not the 
solution... what we try to do is to have islands of purity in functional 
style and switch between default to functional in a hybrid style of 
programming... the answer is not at the extreme..."

This is huge. You have to listen to it to hear just how huge it is. He 
is essentially describing some of the difficulties we have encountered 
and already solved in D2, so it looks we have a strategic advantage.

This is the confirmation I hoped was going to come someday. If it 
surprises me, it that it comes so early, so unequivocally, and so 
aligned terminologically. I'm in Nirvana.


Andrei

P.S. Guy Steele mentions Unicode operators favorably too. Nyuk-nyuk.