A summary of D's design principles

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday 17 September 2010 19:20:20 Nick B wrote:
> On 18/09/2010 12:28 a.m., Justin Johansson wrote:
> > On 17/09/2010 6:48 PM, Nick B wrote:
> >> On 16/09/2010 5:58 a.m., Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >>> A coworker asked me where he could find a brief document of D's design
> >>> principles. This was after I'd mentioned the "no function hijacking"
> >>> stance.
> >> 
> >> there is no one, true, only to be used, library. D supports diversity.
> > 
> > Using Walter's words this is a "trite platitude".
> > 
> > Comments such as these are akin to saying "D is carbon neutral"
> > without a supporting argument.
> > 
> > Can you please support your argument with more substance, i.e.
> > more sausage and less sizzle. :-)
> 
> Is the fact there are two libraries, and not one, or twenty, a strength,
> and not a weakness, of the language and the D community.
> 
> For example, see this list of (approx 100) C++ libraries:
> http://www.trumphurst.com/cpplibs1.html#9
> 
> I think that this large number of libraries, just leads to fragmentation
> of effort by the C++ community.
> 
> Nick B

The fact that D has so few libraries is almost certainly temporary (not to 
mention, if you look at dsource, there are quite a few, though most of them are 
essentially dead). Even Java, which has an extensive standard library, has all 
kinds of 3rd party libraries floating around. Certainly, C++ suffers in part 
because its standard library is so lacking in functionality, but even if it were 
fantastic, there would still be plenty of C++ libraries floating around. Any 
language which is used by a lot of people will eventually have a lot of 
libraries unless the language itself somehow restricts it (which none do to my 
knowledge).

There's nothing inherent in the D language which would restrict the number of 
libraries. Whether there is one library or 5 million has nothing to do with the 
language itself, so I really don't think that it makes sense to talk about the 
number of libraries that D has being part of the philosophy behind it. And 
honestly, while there aren't 100+ D libraries floating around, the division in 
the community over Phobos vs Tango gives the impression that one of the 
philosophies of D is to have one library.

- Jonathan M Davis