Does D have too many features?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 29-04-2012 00:30, Manu wrote:
> On 29 April 2012 00:42, Peter Alexander <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
> <mailto:peter.alexander.au at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
>         Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this
>         question. The idea was which features in D are redundant and/or
>         do not add significant value?
>
>         A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat,
>         cdouble and creal types.
>
>         What's your list?
>
>
>     Here's my list:
>
>     - Properties. They add no value and just start pointless discussions
>     about what should and shouldn't be a property.
>
>     - UFCS. It's just sugar, but adds complexity.
>
>     - const/immutable/inout/shared/__pure. These add massive complexity
>     to the language for little (IMO) benefit. When I do multi-threading,
>     I usually have to resort to casting. Maybe these will improve with time.
>
>     - opDispatch. I think it just promotes sloppy, obfuscated code for
>     minor syntactical benefit. Member access through pointers should
>     require -> like in C++ so that you can overload it for smart
>     pointer/reference ADTs.
>
>     That's all I can think of for now.
>
>
> I disagree with every one of those points, except maybe 'shared', which
> seems like a good idea in theory, but I think it's completely broken
> (every interaction requires an explicit cast, and there is no facility
> for transfer of ownership, which is a VERY common operation in my
> experience)

For shared to be useful, every function you call on/with a shared 
object/value must be templatized. This may be nice if most of the code 
you write is template-rich, but like anything else, templates are not a 
silver bullet.

IMHO shared is heavily biased in its design, which is bad.

-- 
- Alex