The Next Big Language

[so]

IMHO one should not try to find a PL that is easy, what a programmer needs  
is a language that makes things easier. If you dive into high  
performance/flexible/efficient/platform specific... coding nothing will be  
easy anyway.

What makes a language easy/hard is mostly the crucial things it can do,  
just think about C, it has a syntax not hard to learn and keywords not  
that many, but not many people i know can say C is easier than others.

D does a great job on templates and makes them so easy, wouldn't even  
compare to other languages with template support.

On Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:57:16 +0300, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org>  
wrote:

> Sorry but I have to disagree.
>
> Actually after reading TDPL I got the impression that at the semantic  
> level,
> D is not that
> much easier than C++.
>
> It does not make a difference for people that myself that are quite
> comfortable with C++,
> and all its idioms, but I think for the average programmer they are also
> complex.
>
> Which does not rule out people using D, after all you need to have the  
> right
> background
> for doing proper programming.
>
> --
> Paulo
>
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.735.1287519617.858.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>> On Tuesday 19 October 2010 12:53:41 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> On 10/19/10 14:04 CDT, Max Samukha wrote:
>>> > On 10/19/2010 09:06 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> >> bearophile wrote:
>>> >>> The point I was trying to express is that from what I have seen
>>> >>> people
>>> >>> are
>>> >>> able to learn to program Python (this means quite more than just  
>>> the
>>> >>> syntax)
>>> >>> in *much* less time it takes to learn C++/D. And this has precise
>>> >>> causes.
>>> >>
>>> >> Time will tell how long it will take people to become idiomatically
>>> >> proficient in D. But also consider that Andrei's book "Modern C++
>>> >> Design" completely changed the idiomatic way people wrote C++
>>> >> programs.
>>> >> A 1990's state of the art C++ program is very different from a 2010
>>> >> one.
>>> >>
>>> >> We've only just begun figuring out the right way to write D  
>>> programs.
>>> >
>>> > That is funny. Now and then you and Andrei talk so confidently about
>>> > Go,
>>> > C#, Haskell and other D competitors, without having written more  
>>> than a
>>> > couple of lines in those languages. At the same time, you are  
>>> claiming
>>> > that it takes years to even start to learn a programming language.
>>> > Sure,
>>> > it is not problems with D that make it difficult to use. We simply
>>> > don't
>>> > know how to program in D yet, after several years of doing just that.
>>>
>>> I agree this seems to be a contradiction. Haskell is a fairly mature
>>> language building on a staunch pure functional base so many of its
>>> idioms have been established. C# uses rather conservative features so
>>> it's not difficult to learn from the perspective of the languages that
>>> influence it. Go is a small language that has one defining feature (the
>>> implicit signature conformance) that does add a certain flavor but is
>>> understood and has been experimented with in other languages.
>>>
>>> D has added a lot in the direction of generics, and by their nature
>>> generics interact heavily with the rest of the language. I agree it is
>>> taking time to get to best use of such, but it's not wasted time  
>>> because
>>> it marks real progress. For example, code using the relatively new
>>> template constraints is better than code that didn't use them.
>>>
>>> > With all due respect for Andrei, I doubt that it is his book that
>>> > completely changed the way people wrote C++ programs. It was
>>> > influential, right, but it was really not a single factor. And some  
>>> of
>>> > ideas presented in that book are avoided by reasonable programmers.
>>> >
>>> > Please stop so shamelessly advertising each other. Thanks!
>>>
>>> Sorry. Do I advertise Walter that frequently?
>>
>> Both of you do periodically say something about what the other has done  
>> in
>> the
>> past, but I don't get the impression that you're ever explicitly trying  
>> to
>> make
>> the other person look good or "advertise" them. Others may see it
>> differently
>> though.
>>
>> And while in many ways, Modern C++ was a game-changer, I've never worked
>> with
>> anyone who really uses the stuff it talks about. In my experience with  
>> C++
>> code
>> in production code, templates get used when they're necessary but that
>> they're
>> generally avoided. Of course, given how bad some of the code I've seen  
>> is,
>> I
>> definitely don't _want_ a lot of the people who wrote it messing around
>> with
>> heavily-templated code, but regardless, as major as the ideas in Modern
>> C++ are,
>> I think that there are a lot of C++ programmers out who never use them.
>> They're
>> just too complicated for a lot of people. Hopefully D manages to make  
>> such
>> metaprogramming sane enough that your average D programmer won't freak  
>> out
>> about
>> template metaprogramming in the way many C++ programmers do.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
>


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