A possible future purpose for D1 [rant]

[retard]

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:57:13 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:

> bearophile wrote:
>> Walter Bright:
>>> 5. I've discovered over the years that programmers write in particular
>>> "islands" of the language. No matter how large a code base they
>>> produce, they never stray outside that island, so once the bugs they
>>> initially encountered are fixed, they never run into compiler bugs
>>> anymore. The coverage of a test suite is simply not a function of
>>> number of lines of code thrown at it.
>> 
>> This is interesting. I know that different groups of C++ programmers
>> use a different "tidy" subset of C++ (for example Google coding
>> standards forbid many C++ features), but I have never read of this. I
>> presume the mind of human programmers works in a more grammar-based way
>> compared to the normal linguistic generative capabilities. I'll send an
>> email to Steven Pinker about this.
> 
> 
> You see a similar thing with writers. A writer can be identified by
> doing a statistical analysis of the words/phrases used.

I don't think the language can change the way of thinking that much. No 
matter what language you have, certain types of developers use a very 
different coding style. Even if the language is minimalistic or simple 
(Scheme / Io) or horribly complex like C++, code review always reveals 
varying coding styles.