Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[grauzone]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 2:24 PM, John C<johnch_atms at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>> "Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message
>>>> news:h4kkn3$14pv$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>>> But what I want is to come with a new design that adds minimum
>>>>> aggravation on the learning programmer. If they know how to define a method,
>>>>> they must know how to define a property. None of that property blah { get
>>>>> ... set ... } crap is necessary.
>>>>>
>>>> I can't be nice about this: Any programmer who has *any* aggrivation
>>>> learning any even remotely sane property syntax is an idiot, period. They'd
>>>> have to be incompetent to not be able to look at an example like this:
>>>>
>>>> // Fine, I'll throw DRY away:
>>>> int _width;
>>>> int width
>>>> {
>>>>    get { return _width; }
>>>>    set(v) { _width = v; }
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> And immediately know exactly how the poroperty syntax works.
>>> Sure. My point is that with using standard method definition syntax
>>> there's no need for even looking over an example.
>>>
>> Which is why Steven Schveighoffer's is suggestion is the most pragmatic so
>> far. You just add a "property" attribute to a regular function definition.
>> (And it doesn't look ugly, unlike the opGet_/opSet_ idea.)
> 
> +1.
> That's really all that's needed.  A simple flag to say "this function
> acts like a field".

Also note that the syntactic sugar could be implemented as library, 
using macros. Too bad macros were left to D3.0, even though Walter added 
a "macro" keyword. (Which was also a breaking change to the finalized 
D1.0, blergh.)

That said, it would be really convenient for mixed compile time/runtime 
meta programming to be able to associate additional information to a 
method or a field. Like marking a method as property. Java and C# have 
attribute syntax for this. This would be useful for reflection, 
serialization, IDEs, and other modern day crap like this.

Additionally, a "readonly" modifier would eliminate lots of uses of 
properties: often, you just want to make a field not writeable from 
outside. Normally, you would make the field private, and add a public 
readonly getter. Note that making the field immutable is not enough, 
because it can't be written by the class.