D's greatest mistakes

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/30/10 3:23 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei:
>
>> Wonder how the reply is related to the quote.
>
> Sorry, I meant that if your purpose is to "allow many good designs to
> expressible as easily as possible" you risk creating a puzzle
> language as Scheme or Forth. So you have to be careful in how much
> flexibility you give to your language. Some hardcoding or some less
> general features make a language less flexible, but avoid some of the
> risk of turning programming into a kind of puzzle solving.

The explanation doesn't add up any more than the original retort. I 
would understand the comment in case I would have said: "the key is to 
make the language as flexible as possible".

> Sometimes it's also a matter of who uses the language. A very
> flexible language like CLisp is good in the hands of a very
> intelligent programmer, but for most other people a less flexible
> language (as Java) is better and has less risks.
>> Same discussion goes about non-nullable. We don't need the compiler to
>> understand non-nullable types, we need to imbue the compiler with the
>> ability to enforce arbitrary user-defined state invariants, non-null
>> being one of them.
>
> I see, you are saying that if D3 adds typestates (maybe managed
> through user-defined attributes), then implementing full nonnullable
> semantics probably becomes easy enough :-)

Well I wasn't saying that either :o).


Andrei