Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 12 July 2016 at 10:44:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/12/2016 1:41 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> And to be frank D's symbol resolution isn't suitable for 
>> programming-in-the-large
>> either.
>
> Explain.

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/skqcudmkvqtejmofxoim@forum.dlang.org

> Frictionless masses are useful for teaching engineering, but 
> are not useful in the real world, which tends to be complicated 
> and dirty, just like useful programming languages.

Languages sometimes get complicated and dirty when they are 
"patched up" with the requirement that they should not break 
existing code. C++ and Objective-C are such languages, and the 
source is both C and lack of initial design considerations.

However, your claim that Prolog has not been useful in the real 
world is silly. You are making some unstated assumptions about 
what «useful» means. There are plenty of expert-systems based 
upon Prolog.

There are plenty of problems that would be much easier to solve 
in Prolog than in D, and vice versa.

> I asked for one feature originating in Prolog that made its way 
> into mainstream languages.

No you didn't. Unification is Prolog's main feature. C++ template 
matching uses unification.

> You dismissed C++'s enormous influence in getting languages to 
> adopt OOP

Sure, _anyone_ with any kind of education in computing since the 
80s would have learned what OO was way before C++ got mainstream 
around 1990.

C++ got OO into mainstream application development, that's 
different. There were plenty of OO languages around before that 
event.