Does D have too many features?

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 28.04.2012 22:59, schrieb q66:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:35:40 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:09:50 UTC, q66 wrote:
>>> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:05:30 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>>>
>>> There are minimalistic languages that don't add too much complexity,
>>> instead it results in code being kept simple.
>>
>> I appreciate minimalistic languages. I love the simplicity of Scheme
>> and the design of Lua. Lua and Python are extensible language, but
>> truth be told, they cannot handle large scale programming. In fact, I
>> don't know of any minimalistic language that can scale from hundreds
>> of thousands to millions of lines of code. When you reach these sizes,
>> their simple design becomes a drawback. You start missing lots of
>> features. When you reach large scale programming, you want really
>> powerful tools.
>>
>> That's basically what the Java designers discovered after experience.
>> The original language was simple and easy, but that simplicity
>> translated into way too much boilerplate code. So they kept adding
>> features from version to version, generics, then annotations, a means
>> to create new keywords. And now they would like to add delegates.
>> These are all needed in large programs.
>>
>>> D needs to do something it does really well and concentrate on that.
>>> Otherwise the language will remain being rather vague and doing "a
>>> bit of everything, but nothing truly well".
>>>
>>
>> It does a lot of things well already. Our point of comparison should
>> not be Python or Lua, it must be C, C++, C#, Haskell, Ocaml, i.e
>> languages that are designed to develop large systems.
>>
>> But most of all it needs to stabilize and polish, not change all the
>> time. I think its feature set is very good already.
>> We are far from having explored all its possibilities.
>>
>>> Instead of adding more and more features into a rigid language, it
>>> needs to be made more flexible and extensible, both syntactically and
>>> semantically.
>
> This kind of attitude "we need big fat bullshit like Java and heavy use
> of OO and idioms and EH and all that other crap" is broken and false.
> And you have no way to prove that Python for example wouldn't scale for
> large projects; its main fault is that the default implementation is
> rather slow, but it's not pretty much missing anything required for a
> large project.
>

Python is my favorite scripting language, but I would never propose a 
dynamic language for programming on the large.

My employer does consulting for big projects. The type of entreprise 
projects that require multi-site development scattered across the globe,
sometimes with 300+ developers.

There is no way a dynamic language would work in such scenarios, without
having a constant broken build on the CI system.

--
Paulo