Improve D's syntax to make it more python like

[Nick Sabalausky]

On 3/24/2014 6:49 PM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Monday, 24 March 2014 at 22:23:50 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Using the same language on client/server is indeed quite nice, partly
>> because of less mental context-switching, and also because of
>> increased code sharing (which also makes it easier to move things
>> between client vs server if you need to).
>
> Yes, especially for data models. It is always annoying to modify several
> different layers just to add some fields to a database entry. Not a big
> deal, but so… pointless.
>

Yea, common data models was a very big use of shared server/client code 
for me, too.

>> using Haxe pretty heavily for a good while. Haxe is a rather "ok"
>> language, which is practically high praise coming from me - I'm
>> typically very critical of languages.
>
> I've looked at Haxe from time to time, and I like the approach, but it
> has never been sufficient to solve any issues in any real code I've
> worked on.
>

For me, the killer features were:

- As mentioned already, shared server/client code.

- Being able to run code on any commodity PHP servers I was required to 
support, without having to actually *write* any PHP.

- (Note this was several years ago:) Being able to generate Flash 
applets without having to actually use any of Adobe's horrible toolchain.

- The language itself *didn't* totally piss me off. ;)

So yea, the Haxe language itself wasn't really a key thing for me, just 
what it allowed me to *avoid* doing. But even those reasons are loosing 
their bite for me now, since Flash has pretty much become legacy, vibe.d 
has appeared, and I'd just as soon avoid the entire PHP runtime as a whole.

> Yeah, that's where I am at now too. So currently I deal with Python,
> Dart (working hard to get rid of Javascript) and C++ (and dabble with
> XSLT, Java and Objective-C). But I'd rather use something more clean and
> strongly typed like Go and D, but with Pythonesque terseness and
> functional style list processing hight level cleaness. Unfortunately
> both D and Go lack production level support. And even with production
> level support they still lack production quality libraries for excel
> handling, pdf generation etc.

Heh, I guess that's where we differ ;) I'm...not exactly a big Python 
fan, and I find D totally production-ready. I generally avoid 
client-side JS - when I do use it, it's just a sprinkling. If I need to 
do anything else Flash-like in the future, I'm looking more at Unity3D 
(esp. the v5 on the horizon with asm.js support) rather than doing HTML5 
directly or via things like Dart or CoffeScript.