A summary of D's design principles

[Russel Winder]

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 14:33 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> retard wrote:
> > FWIW, if you're picking up one of the most used languages out there, 
> > their list won't differ that much:
> 
> Exactly. Much of that can be summed up as D being intended for professional 
> production use, rather than:
> 
> 1. a teaching tool (Pascal)

Java, Python, C++, Alice are the languages of teaching these days.
Pascal died a death when Borland did.

> 2. a research project (Haskell)

Haskell stopped being a research project many years ago, Haskell
development now happens in companies (including Microsoft) as much as in
universities and is about creating good examples of software
engineering.  Research languages are things like X10, Chapel, OCaml, C
++.

> 3. being focussed on solving one particular problem (Erlang)

Yes but what a problem to have solved:  running the world's telephony
backbone with essentially zero downtime.

> 4. designed to promote a related product (Flash)

What's the related product?

> 5. designed for kids (Logo)

Actually this example is probably fair.

> 6. designed for non-programmers (Basic)

As was Cobol, Fortran, spreadsheets (Visicalc, etc.).  There are
probably more spreadhseet programs out there than any other language:
counting all C, C++, D, and Java programs probably don't even get
close. 

> 7. one paradigm to rule them all (Smalltalk)

Assembly language,  C.

> 8. gee, math is hard (Java)

A very large majority of students study computing and computer science
because they are failed mathematicians.  This probably means every
programming language is the way it is because maths is considered hard
by the inventors.

> 9. implementing skynet (Lisp)

I wonder why Lisp gets so much flack.  It is unique amongst all
programming languages in that code = data is commutative.  This makes
Lisp interesting.  Well perhaps not Common Lisp, but Scheme and Clojure
are.

I think creating lists such as this is very counter-productive as an
approach to trying to promote anything.  It also reflects badly on the
thing being promoted.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
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